Want Feedback? Best Article of Month Teaches You How

I just read an excellent article in Forbes about new and better ways to measure performance. These really are new kinds of metrics. Way better than the usual revenue-derived ones that are slapped on people who have nothing to do with sales. They are somewhat esoteric, but they are eminently linkable and valid to the concept of customer feedback because they are trying to judge how things such as learning, joy, usefulness, and improvement.

I found that points 3, 4 and 5 can be related not just to managing a team, but also to getting feedback from people (whoever your customer is, be it internal or external), and using it to improve things.

Perhaps the most interesting one is Metric 4: Compound Weekly Learning Rate. If you can determine what someone has learned and made themselves better by, be it a software shortcut, a new way to make a meal 5 minutes faster or just tastier, or anything that opens your mind. Or someone else’s. Or makes a better product. Doesn’t really matter, but it demonstrates that you can see people being happy through the joy of learning, and that it compounds, and that joy translates into either more sales, more productivity, more friends, etc. Just a better life.

Metric 5 is sort of like the net promoter score but for real people, not just customers, but it does emphasize being positive and passing along the positives in life to make sure thee are more positives than negatives. Sort of like positive ions for the management soul.

Worth a read, that is for sure.