I am a huge fan of metrics. The longer you read what I write, the more obvious that will become. And I know it puts me at odds with a lot of people, because metrics have a bad reputation. They get abused. Abusive micromanagers use them to squeeze every last drop out of people until the work becomes life-sucking. So when most employees hear the word “metric,” what they actually hear is this: someone is about to make my life miserable and run me out of here.
What surprises people is that managers say the same thing. I have heard plenty of them claim that leadership beats metrics, as if the two were enemies. Here is the problem with that line of thinking. You cannot manage anyone without metrics. They might not be written down. They might not look like zero to sixty in a sports car or how many hot dogs a person can put away in an hour. But they exist. And when a manager runs on “leadership” alone, with nothing written down, the unwritten core metrics often include:
- Do I like you?
- Are there any complaints about you?
We already have names for those, by the way. “Do I like you?” is a customer satisfaction survey. “Are there any complaints about you?” is what shows up as complaints from the people who have to work next to you. Surprisingly enough, these are also metrics, but when written down, they look as silly as they sound… The real difference between what people call leadership and what they call metrics lies mostly in how each is applied.
Poor yet well-meaning leaders lack tangible metrics, while poor application of metrics is a clear substantive lack of leadership. There are bad managers with stacks of metrics who are crushing their people. There are also bad managers without written metrics simply running on gut: Is the job done? Is the customer happy? That second style sounds gentler, but it usually leaves the technician holding the bag for an unreasonable customer or an impossible expectation set by somebody else. Neither one is healthy. In the SMB world we call this “muscle and feel” management. It might work with three employees, but it doesn’t work with ten.
Here is what I think we have to admit. Your employees are being held to a standard, whether you wrote it down or not. So write it down. Once you do, you can call it a metric or a KPI depending on its purpose (all KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs). That does not strip leadership of anything. You still set the vision, the mission, and the values. You still point the business in the right direction. Good leadership and clear numbers are not in competition. You cannot actually have good leadership without metrics of some kind, spoken, written, or assumed. The only real question is whether you are honest about which ones you are using and the weight applied to each.
Once the numbers are clear, good work becomes easy to see and easy to reward. And good numbers mean a successful business; rewarding good work means happy employees; and the two together create rocket fuel!
Gino Wickman, in his book “Traction EOS”, builds his system around a simple idea: everybody has a number. That is one of the truest things I have ever heard, and I have heard it from every seat. I have been the help desk guy. I have been a manager inside a corporate enterprise. For the past eighteen years, I’ve run my own managed IT and security company. Yes! Everybody has a number! That number is not the person’s worth. It is the value of that person’s output to the business. When you know that value, and you are wise, you reward the person appropriately which maintains consistent calculable performance. The kind that allows a business to plan and project for growth.
There is a trap on the other side of this, too. An employee who is burning the candle at both ends to exceed 110% of the goal will burn out. That is not a maybe. They will leave even if they look happy on the surface, because excessive output has become the self-inflicted expectation. I have done this both to myself and others. I have accidentally run good people into the ground because they quietly and without request worked overtime every single day, and I let them. Part of being a decent manager (having a soul) is protecting your best people from themselves, making sure they are home with their families and have lives outside their careers.
When you refuse to write your expectations (another name for metrics) down, you get stuck in a unquantifiable doom loop, whether you meant to or not:
- Are they performing?
- Am I happy with their work?
- Is the customer happy?
That is not a fair way to judge a human being. People deserve to be measured against reasonable, measurable inputs and outputs that show the business is moving the right direction. If someone says “I do not believe in metrics”, what they are really telling you is that their metrics are just big and vague: Is the customer happy? Is the project on time? Are we over or under budget, and why? That can work in a high-pressure, extremely high-paying organization, for a while. People look at those shops and credit the leadership. What they are actually seeing is a group of well-paid, ambitious people competing hard to keep a job they like, right up until they burn out and leave. I have watched it happen. I have been that person more than once. It is not sustainable, for the people or the business.
So here is what I believe. You need leadership at every level, all the way up to the owner, setting mission, vision, and values and steering the business. And you need reasonable metrics and KPIs that you review with employees on a cadence. Weekly for some departments/roles, monthly or quarterly for others, but often enough that the person knows when they are hitting the mark and when they are slipping, long before it ever becomes a termination.
None of that removes grace. It does the opposite. When you are watching the numbers, you notice when a strong performer starts to dip, and most of the time, you find out why while you can still help. A cadence catches the problem early. The alternative is discovering a blown deadline after the fact and getting angry at someone who was quietly going through something hard at home. Do not let the fear of holding people to numbers stop you from setting them. Plenty of employees will push back at first. Start slow, and you can move a team into a healthy rhythm over time. Remember “the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time”!
So get your numbers. Set a goal. Treat people with respect (have a soul) while you hold them to it. Do that, and you will get the output you want. Skip it, and you will get turnover, even if you “feel” high-performing on the way down. What gets measured gets managed. That is the truest sentence I know in business.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
