1+1: How to measure productivity + Paired indicators

Here's one leadership idea and one resource I’ve found beneficial in the past two weeks:

1 idea: How to measure productivity

How you choose to measure success in life shapes everything—sometimes in ways you would not have predicted.

As an author, one of the most common questions I get is, “Do you have a daily word count that you hit to stay on track with your new book?” My answer is “Absolutely not,”—and the logic behind that response is something you should consider, too.

Writing a book is like building a house. Some days, you're laying shingles or painting walls. Progress is visible, satisfying, and easy to photograph. Other days, you're hauling in materials, pulling permits, or staring at the floorplan trying to figure out why the kitchen layout doesn't quite work. On those days, a passerby would swear that nothing was happening—yet those planning and resourcing days are arguably even more important than your painting days.

If you lead a team of knowledge workers, this principle holds true for you, too. Executives, project managers, designers, engineers, students, and pastors all face this same measurement tension. Success is generally not determined by the volume of your output, but by its quality. One well-crafted meeting or thoughtfully-constructed presentation is worth far more than a hundred emails before 10 am. And delivering quality work like this often means that we must spend time on tasks that look like idleness to outsiders: thinking, researching, editing, and exploring.

Asking how many words I wrote today is like asking how many nails I drove on that construction site. It's a fine predictor of progress on framing days but a terrible one on blueprint days. And the second I let nails-per-day become my measure of productivity, I’m going to be tempted to drive nails in places they shouldn’t be. I’m going to trade activity for productivity.

Economists call this Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Once universities began using the SAT to make acceptance decisions, it transformed into a measure of household income rather than college readiness. Why? Because wealthy parents started hiring tutors and paying for SAT-prep courses so their kids could get into good schools. What was once a valuable measure became less so because of the pressure placed on it.

The stronger the incentives are for any target, the more likely it is to get distorted. If your bonus structure is based on how many calls your sales reps make, you can guarantee they will be tempted to prioritize voicemails over real conversations. If you begin to reward the people who put in the most face time at the office, you’ll start to see people show up earlier and stay later even as their true productivity drops and your top performers start looking for other jobs. Once pastors start stewing on attendance numbers, the focus shifts to creating an entertaining experience over true life transformation.

Picking the right measures of success is a nuanced challenge for leaders. Solving it often requires an objective perspective from someone outside the organization like a consultant or coach (wink wink). But here are three questions you can consider to get started:

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1. How well do our measures of success (spoken and unspoken, formal and informal) actually measure what we most want?

2. If people only cared about maximizing these goals, what problems could that create?

3. How could I introduce creative tension in our goals so that they are self-correcting?

1 resource: Paired indicators

If you want to dig deeper into how to set good measurements, Andy Grove’s concept of paired indicators is invaluable. In short, it means matching a measure of quantity with one of quality so that your goals hold each other in tension. You can find a brief description of the concept in this article or read more in Grove's book High Output Management.

PS: The 600-year-old book no one has ever been able to read.