475: What to Hold People Accountable For, with Stacey Barr

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Management, Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Stacey Barr: Practical Performance Measurement

Stacey Barr is a specialist in strategic performance measurement and evidence-based leadership. She is the creator of PuMP®, a performance measurement methodology that routinely transforms measurement cynics into its greatest advocates.

Stacey is also the author of two books, Practical Performance Measurement: Using the PuMP® Blueprint for Fast, Easy, and Engaging KPIs, and Prove It!: How to Create a High Performance Culture and Measurable Success.

In the conversation, Stacey and I explore the struggles of holding people accountable for quantitative results, including behaviors that often lead to unintended consequences. Instead, she invites leaders to hold people accountable for monitoring, interpretation, and action.

Key Points

Holding people accountable for quantitative results tends to lead employees to:

Choosing measures of what they are already good at
Choosing easy targets
Manipulating the numbers to make the measures look good
Having lots of excuses for why targets are missed

Our typical definition of accountability drives the wrong behavior.

Instead, hold people accountable for:

Monitoring the important results: when someone is responsible for a specific business result, like problem resolution or accuracy of advice or eliminating rework, they can be accountable for routinely monitoring that result with a performance measure.
Interpreting their measures: when someone is responsible for monitoring a performance measure, they can be accountable for interpreting what that measure is telling them about the business result it measures.
Initiating action when action is required: when someone is responsible for interpreting a performance measure, they can be accountable for deciding what kind of action is needed, if at all.

Resources Mentioned

Download a free copy of Stacey’s book, Practical Performance Measurement
What is a KPI Owner Accountable For? by Stacey Barr
Measure For Collaboration, Not Competition by Stacey Barr
Case Study: Reducing Administrative Waste With a Single Powerful Performance Measure by Stacey Barr
Reach out to Stacey with questions at info@staceybarr.com

Book Notes

Download my highlights from Practical Performance Measurement in PDF format (free membership required).

Related Episodes

Effective Delegation of Authority, with Hassan Osman (episode 413)
Performance Measurement That Gets Results, with Stacey Barr (episode 419)
How to Balance Care and Accountability When Leading Virtually, with Jonathan Raymond (episode 464)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yes, we should be holding people accountable, but for what?
0:04.3	Perhaps not what you think.
0:05.8	On this episode, three places to zero in.
0:09.2	This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 475. Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.
0:17.0	Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is coaching for leaders and I'm your
0:27.0	host Dave Stahoviac. Leaders aren't born. They're made and this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom
0:35.0	through insightful conversations. We've had many conversations on this show
0:40.7	about holding people accountable, but what do you hold people? on this
0:45.0	show about holding people accountable.
0:46.0	But what do you hold people accountable for today?
0:48.0	A clear answer to that question, one that so many of us
0:51.0	should be utilizing in how we think about accountability, not only for people but for
0:57.4	our organizations.
0:58.6	I am thrilled to welcome back to the show someone who has a tremendous amount of expertise in performance measurement.
1:06.0	Stacy Barr is a specialist in strategic performance measurement and evidence-based leadership.
1:11.4	She is the creator of Pump, a performance management methodology
1:15.6	that routinely transforms measurements cynics into its greatest advocates.
1:20.7	Stacy is the author of two books Practical Performance Measurements using the Pump Blueprint for Fast Easy and Engaging KPI's and Prove it how to create a high performance culture and measurable success.
1:34.2	Stacy, glad to have you back on the show.
1:36.5	I'm super glad to be back, Dave.
1:38.4	Thank you.
1:39.3	Well, we talked first about a year ago on episode 419 which I'll reference later on for folks who want to go back to it on performance
	...

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