Are you measurement-happy?

Great leaders measure what matters — and forget the rest.

THINK ON IT: Are you measurement-happy?

There's no doubt about it: we humans love to keep score. Just look at the plethora of stats kept for Major League Baseball for decades on end (and football and basketball and golf and… there’s no end to the data we collect about our sports teams) and trotted out to add interest during pre-game and post-game commentary. 

And never before has it been easier to measure things. Every day, it seems, new apps flood the market to measure everything — step counts and email conversion rates and happiness on a scale of one to five smiley faces. 

You can measure just about anything, both personal and business — and there’s probably an app for that. 

That's good, right? After all, Peter Drucker once said "what gets measured gets managed." And we all want to manage better.

But there's more to Drucker's comment. He goes on to say: "...even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so."

So it is true — what we measure, we manage. But Drucker's real point was, are we measurement-happy to the point of distracting our team from the strategy of our business?

Are you measuring the things that matter? Or wasting time and leadership energy on the things better left unmeasured? 

"The pursuit of data, in almost any field, has come to resemble a form of substance-abuse, accompanied by all the usual problems of addiction: self-doubt, denial, temptation, relapse, and withdrawal." — Edwin Friedman

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