Once you’ve established your KPIs (check out the KPI Construction Zone) for your department, support your team by building a predictable reporting cadence.
Many organizations or departments spend the effort to create useful KPIs. They announce them with great fanfare during a department or company huddle. They take the time to create gorgeous dashboards that everyone is supposed to review each week. They give those KPIs “most favored toy” status and display them right on the middle of the bed.
Eventually, however, the excitement wears off. Other projects are prioritized and new crises emerge. Suddenly those KPIs get accidentally knocked to the floor, or are put out of reach on the top shelf, or, even worse, get left behind for the first time when Andy goes off to cowboy camp.
But there’s no need for your KPIs to be neglected, get dusty, or be sold off to an overseas museum by a nefarious toy store owner in a chicken suit. Following your KPI rollout, discussing performance in a regularly scheduled meeting is an easy way to ensure that those metrics don’t simply exist on a spreadsheet or reporting tool, but remain visible, well understood, and operated with fresh batteries at all times.
Realize Immediate Benefits
Active conversations with your team about its results improves team engagement and supports a level of performance that exceeds the impact of passively reviewing data independently and more than justifies the additional time spent each week.
Accelerate the feedback loop.
A weekly meeting provides the forum for the team to discuss what is going well or poorly, and, more importantly, why on a real time basis, keeping them connected with team performance.
Improve team engagement and results.
Keeping KPIs consistently visible often improves performance by continually reinforcing critical drivers of success and performance expectations. If you have the right Team Members, they WANT to do well, and they will hold themselves accountable to their targets more diligently than you ever could.
Give yourself a chance to be a star.
As a leader at your organization, your contributions are expected to extend beyond those of the functional head of a department. Your peers and bosses around the organization expect you to not only describe what has happened, good or bad, with your team. They also want to know why, they want to know if that recent performance will continue, and they want to know how it will impact their goals as well as the goals of the broader company. For you, these conversations are an incredibly efficient way to stay on top of team results and their underlying drivers, letting you be prepared with the data and corresponding insights to answer those questions even before being asked.
Setting up Your Reporting Rhythm
Build a Clean and Clear Reporting Tool
There isn’t a single right way to present your department’s KPIs. You want your KPI tracker to be easy to quickly update and be readable and accessible by everyone on the team. It should also display performance both across time and against a target level.
At a minimum, I’d suggest a table with dates across the top and each KPI in its distinct row. Within this format we use a “red / yellow / green” highlighting scheme that makes it easy to see trends in performance. From there you can gradually add context and richer variance comparisons. Better alternatives to a table include charts created in Excel or Google Sheets, or data visualized in interactive graphs through other tools
Schedule Recurring Reporting Sessions
These conversations often don’t require an additional meeting. They should take only about five to fifteen minutes, and often can be folded into previously scheduled team conversations, such as one of your teams’ daily standups or your weekly OKR meetings.
Your meeting cadence should match your reporting calendar. Ideally you are able to report on most of your department KPIs on a weekly basis. Shorter, more frequent, measurement periods accelerate the feedback you receive from the data you are tracking, and also allow a more consistent level of engagement with your team. To the extent your KPIs include some metrics with longer (bi-weekly or monthly) reporting periods, that’s fine - just know those won’t be discussed in every meeting.
Require Attendance by Everyone
On the wall of one of our conference rooms is the following quote from NBA Hall of Famer Joe Dumars: “On good teams, coaches hold players accountable. On great teams, players hold players accountable.” (Please note that as a lifelong Boston Celtics fan I’m loathe to give any credit to a member of the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons teams, so please anticipate that I’ll toss in some cheap shot about Bill Lambier in a future article).
A main goal is to reinforce, week after week, that these are the most important metrics to the success of this department, so include your entire team in your reviews. Team Members will be proud when they hit their metrics (and should be celebrated each and every week) and will take accountability when the team falls short. The act of focusing attention on an item is likely to be matched by each Team Member taking the steps expected of them to contribute to team success.
It’s also critical that you attend. Your team will believe these KPIs are important if you behave like they are important. You should be modeling the behavior you want and committing to the handful of minutes each week (barring normal events like PTO or sick time off).
Discuss - don’t just Describe
The agenda for the conversation starts with a presentation of the results for the week. Yes - everyone on your team is able to read for themself, but methodically discussing results line by line ensures that good performance is acknowledged and missed targets are addressed. Nothing gets overlooked.
As your team settles into the routine, the meeting will start to emphasize the variance drivers (good and bad) versus the benchmark and prior periods. The value of the conversation isn’t a regurgitation of information that can otherwise be accessed, but the explanations of performance that highlight successes or issues that need to be addressed.
It also becomes a useful time to brainstorm process changes in real time that can lead to quick performance improvements. Having full attendance also means more complete information is available on a real time basis during the discussion. If there are issues, the team members involved will typically jump in; not to sacrifice themselves to the vengeful gods of public shaming, but to identify an issue and often proactively suggest a change that can be implemented immediately.
To this end, what we have found is that adding a five to fifteen minute weekly conversation saves time in the long run. Team members address issues on the spot; we can often skip or truncate retro meetings or processing mapping exercises because we’ve worked through many of the problems in real time.
Give Your Team a Chance to Shine
Our recommendation is that the weekly presentation isn’t led by you or even your team lead. Instead, a final small benefit of these conversations is offering regular presentation opportunities to your team members. Asking the staff to lead the discussion further increases the feeling of accountability, builds confidence, and encourages contributions from shy team members who may be less likely to speak up on their own. If I work on a project with a Team Member, I typically would want them to lead the discussion when we present the results. These weekly meetings offer a safe space for those who want to hone their presentation skills long before they get placed in front of other members of the executive team.
Your Turn!
Getting buy in may be your biggest challenge.
People are busy, and the prep required for another meeting - even a short one - isn’t going to generate a lot of enthusiasm. But if you’re participating in this exercise, it likely means that your company or department hasn’t demonstrated a metrics-based performance mindset that meets your expectations. This is a time when you need to insist on its importance and build these organizational muscles.
That said, while work isn’t always a democracy, explaining the “Why” and attempting to align with your team members on the value of the exercise will certainly help this initiative be more successful. I’ve included a memo in the Resource Section that I used internally with our Team Leads to help them understand what I wanted and why I thought it was important. If this helps you find a cleaner path to team buy-in, then feel free to download, modify to fit your needs, and share internally as appropriate.
Set a firm start date.
It is fair to give your teams a week or so to prep for the first dashboard meeting, but I strongly recommend insisting on a kickoff date soon after first introducing this framework. People are busy, and there’s always going to be another project or meeting or deliverable that may be floated as a reason the start date gets pushed back week after week. Calculating and visualizing four to ten KPIs per week and presenting them (in a pre-existing meeting, if possible) is a very low investment relative to the value that you’ll get.
Feel free to share any of these articles with your teams as you think it would help them, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help getting anything off the ground. Good luck!
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