What Really Matters?
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 11:02AM I pay a lot of attention to how business and other types of organizations (non-profits, government and educational institutions, faith communities) are functioning, evolving and interacting with their employees and those they claim to serve. This is going to sound overly dramatic, but I think that there is a struggle for the heart and soul of the organization taking place. The struggle is largely about tangibles vs. intangibles. What is most important? What should we pay attention to...what drives our business? What is the priority? Our tangible resources or the intangible?
My work deals with intangibles and I am a fierce advocate for prioritizing them. I am in the minority. I see tangible assets as being the stuff that really matters. Love, passion, loyalty, creativity, curiosity, influence, empathy, organizational culture, social and emotional intelligence, ethics, integrity, diversity, inclusion….all incredibly important and all intangible. Try as we might, we can never measure these things the way we can measure a pound of flour or the size of our bank account.
I think that organizations tend to make two very real mistakes regarding how they view the assets and resources that they have access to:
1.) Focus too much on tangible assets, which actually tell us a lot less than we think they do.
Take profit for example…
The mother of all priorities. A great deal of emphasis is placed on profit…what will generate a profit, are you profitable now, what is the bottom-line, yadda, yadda, yadda. I am not going to say that profit is not important, I do understand numbers and how business works…but profit is greatly overrated as an indicator of how you are doing as an organization. Whether you are profitable today does not tell me whether or not you made a profit ethically, it does not tell me whether or not you did it in a way that adds to your ability to be profitable tomorrow it actually tells me very little other than for the time frame that we are considering you made more money than you spent. Looking at profit is kind of like looking at the speedometer when you are driving…it is clearly important to know our speed, but the speedometer does not tell me whether or not I have any gas left or whether I am even traveling in the right direction. Placing too much attention on tangibles can easily lead to compromising on the really important stuff. Over emphasizing profit will always lead some people and some organizations to sacrifice people and principles to get more profit.
2.) Try to measure intangible assets as if they were tangible.
There are countless examples of this. There are probably about eleventy gazillion consulting agencies that have some neat shiny metric for employee engagement, organizational culture, inclusion, influence and it is all hogwash. You cannot quantify these things anymore than you can quantify love and the more that you try to quantify them and rely on these metrics the more you distort them and turn a real and dynamic thing into a one-dimensional commodity that actually tells you very little. You can use metrics as indicators of engagement or indicators of wha the culture of an organization is like, but unless they are part of a larger conversation they can easily do more harm than good.
What are the conversations about “what matters” like in your organization or community? What metrics, numbers or ratios do you pay attention to? What are your indicators of success? Do you measure your "success" based on what you truly value as an organization or community?
Be good to each other.
Leadership, change 