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Volume 4, Number 2: February 11, 2007Dear ZPG eNewsletter Subscriber, Last issue included recent performance measurement articles. Below is an original piece I did on measuring an example of the really hard-to-measure stuff. If you have ideas for topics you'd like to see addressed in future issues, drop me a line at jack@zigonperf.com. Jack Zigon Measuring the Hard Stuff: Developing Relationships with People You're Trying to InfluenceNot everyone does easy-to-measure work like manufacturing or sales. Sometimes you are asked to measure knowledge work. One of the hardest kinds of intellectual work to measure is when someone is influencing others by developing useful relationships with them. This newsletter will describe two examples of hard-to-measure work involving positions that influence people: lobbyist and public relations. In both cases we used the same process to create the goals: review organization goals, define the customers and their needs, identify the results that support both organizational goals and customer needs, define the measures, both numeric and descriptive, set the goals and finally think through how to track the information. Instead of walking through each step in the process, I'm going to talk about the unique measurement problems we faced and how we solved them. You can view complete examples of the results, measures and goals at these links: Example 1: Lobbyist Answering "What results does the lobbyist position produce which adds value to the organization?" produced the list of resuls below:
When thinking about how to measure legislative language the two important aspects were "no surprises" and how favorable the final language is to the organization. For "no surprises," the important thing was that the organization not hear first about new legislation that affected them from someone other than the lobbyist. As far as favorability of any published language, since there's no way to control all language in a bill, a percentage of bills passed with language that is judged "favorable" by the organization was used. In this particular instance the goal was set using a range of 50% to 75% to account for the lack of absolute control. In addition, if any language drafted by the lobbyist appears in the final legislation, this would be an indicator of success. Visibility could be observed by legislative staff sharing draft language with the lobbyist for comments prior to voting as well as asking for advice on issues. Both of these behaviors are observable and verifiable and get at the heart of "visibility." Just showing up at events isn't being visible. Having staff give you a heads up on new legislation as a result of the relationship you developed at events is adding true value. Developing relationships can also be measured. We first created a list of observable and verifiable milestones for each targeted individual and then ranked them from lowest to highest value to the organization, assigning an number to each level. From year to year we could observe a movement of targeted individual from level to level and record this as the percentage of the target group which is at each level on the scale: 1 Met them The client decided that the highest level of relationship was when the targeted individual provides help or volunteers advice or information of use to the organization. Sometimes lobbyists meet with people for its own sake. This makes it clear when the relationship has begun to provide a return for all the time invested and thus the lobbyist has a goal to shoot for beyond "improving the relationship." Example 2: Public relations professional Rather than look at the entire position, I'm going to focus on how developing relationships with journalists could be measured. Many times, both for-profit and non-profit organizations develop relationships with journalists, educating them concerning their issue or cause, hopefully resulting in greater and more favorable press coverage. While the coverage could be measured by number of articles, inches of coverage, quality of the publication, etc., the quality of the relationship leading to the coverage is more difficult to measure. Using an approach similar to the one above, a list of verifiable milestones was developed that represented incremental improvements in the relationships with targeted journalists. Each milestone in the list is more valuable than the previous one: 1 - Contact information is complete (name, outlet, mailing address, email address, phone, fax) Again the organization could define the total universe of targeted journalists and look at growth in the size of that list from year to year (more journalists who are interested in this topic are found) as well as improvement in the relationships with these targets from year to year, as evidenced by their progression from level 1 to 7. Summary While knowledge work is difficult to quantify, it can be made more measurable by defining verifiable criteria for important results the position is supposed to produce. Using scales of observable criteria which define various levels of performance provide a way to communicate clear expectations and track performance to offer actionable feedback to the employees. For more information on this topic:
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Helpful LinksHow ZPG Can Help Your Organization If you are looking for an objective, outside perspective to help you improve the results you achieve from your performance appraisal or performance management systems, ZPG can provide training, consulting, speaking, assessment services or published materials. We offer help with:
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