To measure, or not to measure ...

 ... that is the question.

(I hope you will forgive my paraphrasing of Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy from “Hamlet”).

In management, one good piece of advice is to pick meaningful metrics that drive the result you want. Because, let’s face it, people will do that on which they’re measured.

For instance, if you’re trying to grow your organization’s membership, what’s the best metric you can find that lets you measure how well you’re doing? Is it the number of new members? Maybe it’s your retention rate.

Beware! There’s a world of difference between “meaningful” metrics and “vanity” metrics. Some common “vanity” metrics are page views, number of visitors, social media likes, etc. To differentiate between the two types, ask yourself 3 questions:

1. Can I tie this back to real performance?
2. Does this reflect what’s REALLY happening?
3. Can I do something useful with this information?

But beware of something known in economic circles as “Goodhart’s Law”. Charles Goodhart was a British economist who held that, when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Let’s circle back to the goal of growing your organization’s membership. You have decided that your metric will be the number of new members you sign up. There’s a danger though that, over time, what your team SHOULD be doing, in order to gain new members, will be subordinated to the end goal of simply signing up new members.

In reality, maybe it wasn’t the number of new members that you needed to measure in order to grow your organization. Maybe what actually drove the members to join was the value or quality of what your organization offered. The members joined because of what you had to offer and focusing simply on the sheer number of new members caused that metric to no longer be a valid one.

So, YES, measuring performance is good. Just make sure that what you’re measuring actually drives the outcome you want..