Choosing the Right Measuring Stick

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Recently, at SpringHill, we’ve made an intentional change in how we evaluate our current performance. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts we track a number of indicators that help us gauge how well we’re performing against our goals and fulfilling our mission.

Even though, for years, we set annual goals, broken down by period (our year’s divided into three periods like a hockey game) and by month, our default position has been to compare our results to the previous year. There are many reasons we’ve done this but I think, at the end of the day, it’s been our desire to always improve that’s made last year’s results our measuring stick. So if we exceeded last year, we’ve improved and because improvement has been a higher priority than achieving our goals, we’ve been satisfied.

Then, over the last year, our team’s recognized that improving isn’t enough, that we work hard at setting achievable goals that align with our longer term targets. Our goals mean something. They’re important, even more important than what we did last year because, though we may be improving, the improvement doesn’t guarantee we’ve went far or fast enough to reach those long-term targets.

So we’ve made the change, it’s official. We no longer have improvement over last year as our measuring stick. It’s now our annual, period, and “split time” goals that we measure our performance against.

We’ve even taken last year’s numbers off our Scoreboard which we review in our weekly Huddle meetings. We’ll continue to use the previous year’s results as input into our goal setting as well as in helping analyze our current position but it’s now performance against our goals that will drive our work.