Prove it!: how to create a high-performance culture and measurable success
STACEY BARR
First published in 2017 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
42 McDougall St, Milton Qld 4064
Office also in Melbourne
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© Stacey Barr Pty Ltd 2017
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All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.
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Disclaimer
The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacey Barr is a specialist in organisational performance measurement and its application in evidence-based leadership. She has always loved working with numbers, and organisational performance measurement became her niche early in her career.
Since the late 1990s, she has worked with a wide variety of organisations around the world, particularly in the public sector, to help them make their strategy measurable, develop meaningful measures for what matters, and create a performance culture. Stacey believes in evidence, evidence that helps us learn how to make the impact we want, and helps us celebrate the impact we make.
Outside work, her passion is nature and the outdoors, and just about any physical activity that takes her to it: mountain biking, cycling, trail running, kayaking, and hiking.
Her homebase is in semi-rural south-east Queensland, Australia.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Ahmed Shoukri, Andrew Garnham, Andrew Phillips, Anneli Karlsson, Anetta Pizag, Becky Thomas, Bryan Dilling, Charles Assey, Chris MacMillan, Claire Janes, Cynthia Abou Khater, Emily Verstege, Emmanuel Aiyenigba, Gerry Prewett, Helen Tilley, Herman Kasro, Jack Spain, Janet Sawatsky, Jennifer Oxtoby, Jesus Garcia, John Morri, Joscelyn Haggarty, Kathleen Simon, Ken McFetridge, Kerrie Donaldson, Lance Jakob, Leanne Ma, Louise Watson, Maryke Savenije, Mike Davidge, Paul Marambos, Peter O'Donnell, Remy Milad, Ruth Hama, Salome Serieys, Scott Maynard, Shahid Hussain Jafri, Todd Pait, Tony Guillen, Ulrike Neumann, Val Purves, and Wayen Miller, who each reviewed the draft of this book and shared additional stories, references and suggestions for style that improved the clarity of the messages I wanted to share. Your encouragement reinforced the need for this book and my confidence in creating it.
Thank you to the team at Wiley – particularly Allison Hiew, Chris Shorten, Clare Dowdell, Ingrid Bond, Lucy Raymond and Theo Vassili – for your helpful, collaborative and professional approach that made each step of bringing this book to fruition so enjoyable. You've all made me a better author.
Finally, thank you to Matt Church for the conversation that inspired the idea and title for this book in the first place.
PREFACE
This is a book for leaders. Organisations have a mission, a vision and a set of strategic goals. They have these things because organisations exist to achieve something, to make some difference in the world, to serve a purpose. And the job of leaders is to bring that to fruition – to make the conceptual goals a tangible reality.
But how can we know how well that's happening, or if it's happening at all? How can we know if we are leading our organisations to make a measurable difference? Most leaders talk about productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, quality, engagement, best practice, sustainability and profitability. And yet we struggle to inspire our leadership team, and everyone throughout the organisation, to:
• do what's most needed to fulfil the mission
• realise the vision
• achieve the strategic goals.
The world is demanding more and more of organisational leaders. The world wants more transparency – to see the truth about how organisations are performing. And not just in terms of profit, but also how they treat people and the planet. The world wants more accountability, holding leaders responsible for the performance of their organisations. Many leaders may be kept awake at night, panicked by what transparency might reveal about their organisation's performance and how they might be held to account.
But the best leaders won't be panicking. The best leaders already know how their organisations are performing, in terms of profit, people and the planet. They know that performance has improved under their leadership, and they can prove it because they measure it. They can prove it because they practise evidence-based leadership.
If we want to know the impact of our leadership on our organisation – if we want to know what legacy we will leave – we have to prove it. And to prove it, we have to measure it. What our gut says, and what ‘they' say, is not proof. A finished improvement project or change initiative or capital investment or new product line is not proof. For proof we need objective measures of the results that these investments were supposed to improve.
Measuring performance is like gravity. It pulls our attention and action toward a centre, toward the most important things we should focus on and improve. When we measure the important performance results, we move more directly toward those results and we achieve them sooner and with less effort.
When an eagle circles the sky, hunting for a meal, she sees her prey, she works out how far it is from her, and she lines up the most direct path toward it. Instinctively, she lets gravity pull her toward her goal, effortlessly and rapidly.
For leaders of organisations, performance measurement is the gravity that speeds up and takes effort out of our pursuit of what we want. So we get bigger and better improvements for less effort. And, on an organisational scale, evidence-based leadership is the process of using measurement as the gravity to draw the whole organisation toward the results that matter most.
Evidence-based leaders can prove how well their organisation is delivering what matters most, measurably and objectively and convincingly.
This book is about a system of evidence-based leadership. It maps out the principles, habits and processes that leaders must master to create high-performance organisations. Organisations that can:
• measure their impact
• demonstrate how well they fulfil their mission and realise their vision
• make the world better than they found it.
The evidence-based leadership map is like any map for a territory we want to explore: there isn't only one path to follow. My hope is for this book to guide you through the territory of high-performance organisations. I hope it shows you what's possible, helps you navigate and points out things you otherwise wouldn't have noticed. Let's begin our adventure!