Inspire people and they will follow you. Measure them and they will measure you.

I am 32 colours and then some.  I am a pink flamingo living in a brown duck pond.

I was facilitating a board planning meeting for an organization of over $160 million with less than 50 employees.  The topic of performance management came up, or down more accurately.  It was a classic brown duck auditor question.

"How do you know you are making each person accountable if you are not drilling down the corporate measures to the individual?"

I am a former corporate planner with over 20 years experience implementing corporate planning and performance systems such as balanced scorecard, reporting, CEO performance and planning. I learned one simple lesson:  inspire people and they will follow you.  Measure people and they will measure you."

June 15, 2011 was my date of emancipation from that world.  No, I did not retire. I fired that part of my life because it did not measure up.  I realized it is fatally flawed and unhealthy.

Now that I am on the outside, I feel more alive and free than ever before. But there are a lot of good people back there, losing parts of themselves every day, ducking and weaving, enduring and hiding in the weeds.

Now I am on a quest to educate and challenge corporate thinking and behaviours.

The question posed that day is a classic example of a problem that is rampant and affecting people every day who must endure this unhealthy approach.

"How do you know you are making each person accountable if you are not drilling down the corporate measures to the individual?"

There are two things wrong with this statement: language and intent.  

Let's take a look at the actual words:

- "Making each person accountable"

• This statement is actually the same as saying 'force people to do something to cover your butt`. That never inspires anyone nor does it garner respect.  
• This statement implies that we can "make" someone do anything, which is just erroneous and typical of corporate brown duck culture; and finally,
• The statement implies punishment. 

- "drilling down the corporate measures to the individual"

• Drilling down makes me think of the dentist; I hear jack hammers and other violent sounds.   
• Corporate measures are something few people understand or care about; they care about parking, vacation, retirement and freedom. Corporate measures are the job of the people in charge, the leaders. 
• The individual cannot carry the corporate measure.  That statement is just wrong.  It is physically impossible to move something like Return on Equity to the individual because the individual can`t affect it.  It is equally impossible to make an individual accountable for something like the organization's customer satisfaction results because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is even more insane to expect employees to be responsible for employee satisfaction and  culture, as those are clearly the leaders' accountability. 

I offer this perspective with first hand experience of having learned and witnessed how hurtful this kind of thinking is, both to the employees and the organization and how futile it is to try and capture people through measurement.It becomes a game of cat and mouse.  Once they know the chase for measurement is on, you will never catch them. 

In the 20 years of my career in this field, admittedly I was zealous in implementing corporate performance systems. I believed it would empower and inspire people, but I said and wrote the same thing to quack and waddle like a duck.

(I was a Flamingo in hiding. She would come out from time to time, but usually in the form of shoes. I believe that if we know better, we do better.  I know better now, so I do better.) 

Understanding where these ideas comes from helps to understand the problem.  Corporate strategy tools come from the military, so they are aggressive in tone.  In fact, looking at my bookshelf to my right, are book titles such as "Strategy DNA", "Ready, Fire, AIM", "Risk", "Willful Blindness", and Fierce Leadership", none of which have I cracked in 3 years.

On the next shelf below, the more recent book titles such as ``Unstuck``, ``The Book of Awesome``, and ``Persuasion``.  (Interesting note that the latter collection attempts to balance out the former.)

In the 90's, Kaplan and Norton came out with the Balanced Scorecard concept to inspire leaders to expand their focus on the bottom line to include people, their customers, and their environment.  

The intention behind the Balanced Scorecard tools is to create focus, clarity about what it all means to the average duck, and getting the ducks in a row and working together.  I continue to support these concepts in my life in setting goals and getting somewhere.

However, the intention behind the action and the ``user`` of said knowledge, is what creates the outcome. Like all things, a good thing used badly becomes a bad thing. So it's not the tool's fault when things go awry in the work world.  It's a person's fault, someone whose title includes "leader". I think they call that ``Human error``, like its a computer malfunction.  

If I could shout one thing from the rooftop of the highest building it would be this:

A leader is a communicator.  He or she is an inspiration and one who inspires, and has the ability to stand in another person's shoes at any given moment and act appropriately. A leader admits fault openly and takes steps to correct the situation.  Someone who sees people as "assets" to be owned, controlled and even punished does not belong in a leadership position at all and should be removed immediately. 

In my world as a pink flamingo living in a brown duck pond, I became very good at dancing on the edge between the accountants, project managers and auditors who thought control mechanisms worked, and the rest of "us" who were looking for something human in the work experience. 

I know for a fact as a former corporate planner, strategist and employee if we treat people with respect and inspire them with the vision and help them to see how they can contribute and grow themselves as a result, people will be inspired to do even more than the brown ducks thought imaginable. 

So in response to the question posed by the auditor, this was my answer: 

Drilling down measures into people does not solve problems. In fact, it creates problems because it takes the conversation off the topic from what really matters.   

If the problem were clarity, it would be the CEO`s responsibility to ensure his or her managers understand so that they can provide clarity to the people in their trust. 

If the issue were focus, then it would be the board`s responsibility to ensure priorities are clearly defined and reasonable and the CEO`s to maintain focus on those priorities and ensure they are adequately resourced;

If it were an issue of alignment,then management would need to revisit the organizational structure and make adjustments.

It is far better to inspire people than it is to measure them.

The Board asked me to write that into their plan.