A number of years ago I found a management hack that was easy. Almost too easy. All it took was a spreadsheet, an email, and some discipline. I did it for almost ten years straight.
Every Sunday Evening
Every Sunday evening I opened the lid of my laptop, and pulled together company metrics for the prior week. At first, it is challenging because data has to be gathered from a variety of disparate systems. And sometimes you won’t have tracking set up for the metrics you really want to understand.
At some point, though, pulling the data became routine, and that part of the activity lasted all of 10 to 15 minutes. It was easy.
Then, I’d do the work to interpret what the numbers were saying.
- What is going well? What’s going less well?
- Are any metrics going parabolic? Is anything broken?
- Most importantly, what should we do? Do we need to change course based on what’s working, or what’s not?
Finally, I’d tap out an email with a summary of the metrics that mattered, and some guidance on what we should think about, work on, or look at in the following week based on what I was seeing. I always added a link to the spreadsheet so the team could inspect the metrics for themselves. Then, I schedule the email to be sent out on Monday morning before the team logs in.
All of this took 30-40 minutes, max, but it was so impactful.
Surprising Impact of the Weekly Routine
There were a number of positive outcomes from this approach.
Positive Outcomes for Me
First, it helped me keep an eye on the road as a leader. It is easy to get distracted by all the other parts of the job, not realizing that the product or service is drifting. Taking time to look at and interpret metrics each week snapped me back into what was important – our customers’ and employees’ experiences.
Next, it helped me watch the metrics themselves morph over time along the spectrum from gut-feel, to comparison versus historical, to comparison versus projections. When you first start tracking a metric, it is hard to tell whether the number is “good” or “bad.” You need comparables. When you measure something weekly, you begin to understand what normal looks like, and what it does not look like. Eventually, you have enough data to confidently project metrics mathematically. It’s a process that takes time.
Positive Outcomes for the Team
Sharing the metrics regularly helped the team understand the bigger picture. While many team members were more connected to the tactical “real world” than I was, they often struggled to see the forest for the trees. Comparing the numbers to what people were experiencing sparked valuable discussions. We questioned whether we were measuring something incorrectly or overemphasizing our response to a high-emotion but low-frequency issue.
On Monday mornings, I emailed the team to focus their attention on the important and impactful parts of the business, steering them away from routine. Most people naturally prefer sticking to tasks similar to those from the previous week, so I made an effort not to disrupt their workflow or change the too much. However, in a fast-paced environment, prioritizing the most critical tasks and staying ahead were essential.
Over time, we set the cultural tone by managing the business based on metrics whenever possible. As other departments observed the effectiveness of this approach, they began creating their own metric spreadsheets and managing them weekly.
It’s almost too easy
Some management tactics come across as high fallutin’, but not this one. I’d suggest capturing and sharing weekly metrics to anyone in a leadership role, manager or not. It’s fun, easy, and effective. Good luck!