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Manager Tools

Don't Change Metrics

Manager Tools

Mike Auzenne

Feedback, Strategy, Careers, Coaching, Management, Skills, How-to, Development, Advice, Business, Leadership

4.61.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2013

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This guidance describes why not to change the metrics you use for your team's behaviors.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's topic, don't change metrics. Here we go.

0:05.0

Welcome everybody. Mike and I are actually in the same room recording this.

0:10.0

We are in a conference room at some hotel near Washington DC and this is only our second time that we've ever recorded a podcast live

0:18.7

There are a bunch of people in room with us. please say hello. Okay, a lot of managers, particularly ones that are new to a team in directs,

0:30.0

they see metrics as a way of getting different I'd hope better results right and totally it was stupid but true

0:38.1

And it worked but it was sometimes it works. Yeah, but we were talking about this sometimes as and rarely

0:51.0

Yeah, sometimes right it's marginally never but it's technically sometimes too. Yeah. So what does an effective manager do then? Yeah. Look. Okay, so here's the basic outline of the cast.

0:54.4

First of all, what most managers don't realize is that they're so unconnected to what their

1:00.1

results actually should be, that they become focused on the metrics, whatever measures they use, and they manage to the metrics.

1:08.0

But metrics are what are called proxies. In other words, they're things that are designed to help us understand what our outcomes will be, but they're not the actual outcomes.

1:17.0

Sales managers, for instance, measure things like how many calls you make.

1:21.0

But you don't make any more money based on how many calls you make, you make money based on how many calls you make. But you don't make any more money based on how many calls you make

1:23.6

you make money based on how much money you bring in, right? So metrics are

1:27.6

proxies. A big reason why a lot of managers change metrics because every

1:31.7

metric has a hater.

1:32.8

There's somebody on your team who will tell you

1:34.4

the reason we're getting the wrong results because we're measuring the wrong stuff.

1:37.6

Hater.

1:38.6

That guys, yeah, I hate them.

1:39.4

I totally hate them.

1:41.4

And you shouldn't hate.

1:42.1

You know, you really shouldn't be a hater.

...

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