At a conference recently the speaker was Sir Howard Davies, who we hear about most often as the Chairman of the UK Airports Commission, looking at options for Heathrow, Gatwick and Boris Island.
In the 1990s he was also a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, sitting on the Monetary Policy Committee which sets interest rates.
He is a hugely informed and engaging speaker, and he certainly didn’t hold back from voicing his opinions on the current direction of the Bank of England, his former employer. He was particularly critical of aspects of the policy of ‘forward guidance’, where the new Governor, Mark Carney, has committed to give advanced warning of any future changes of interest rate.
He wasn’t so critical of the idea of giving advanced warning in principle, but rather the measure chosen: the bank has stated that interest rates would need to rise when the employment rate falls below 7%.
Davies’ view was that employment rate was a very poorly chosen measure for this purpose. He stated that historically the Bank of England has been very poor at predicting this rate. (Indeed this has turned out to be the case in the early months of the policy.) By very publicly hanging the policy on only one notoriously tricky measure the Bank, in his view, has made a grave error.
Listening to this it highlighted the importance of how essential it is for leaders to choose the right control measures to track and to steer their businesses by. This behaviour is called ‘Quality Measurement’.
Quality Measurement is one of the leadership behaviours that we rate and coach at my360 plus. It is a behaviour that has a proven direct correlation to performance. There is a specific focus on measuring things that lead to better value for the customer, and therefore greater long term organisational success.
Here are some of our ‘top tips’ to help improve your Quality Measurement:
- What can you do to better monitor the current project or work you are doing?
- How can you make sure you are making progress?
- Do you ensure individual, team and divisional objectives are regularly set?
- How can you improve the monitoring of your activities over the coming week, month and three months?
- What will success look like from this point over these time periods?
- How can you have a conversation with your key customers to understand how they really measure you?
- What can you change that will improve success against these measures?
- What are you measuring ‘because you always have’ that doesn’t really add any value?
- How might you replace these with measures that really matter especially to a customer?
- Do you value performance measurement – is it part of your everyday language?