Getting leadership support for KPIs and measuring performance is the biggest challenge our community faces. So how do we position the value of measurement, to win their support?
Practitioners often assume their task is to educate executives about clearer goals, better KPIs, or smarter dashboards. This is where many well-intentioned efforts to engage leaders in measurement go off track. While we focus on explaining what good measurement looks like, leaders are silently asking a different question: “How does this help me lead?”
Leaders don’t necessarily oppose measurement on technical grounds (even if they don’t have clear goals, good KPIs, or smart dashboards). They oppose it when it feels like extra work, retrospective reporting, or a compliance exercise disconnected from their real challenges of leading and executing strategy.
What we have here is a positioning problem. And we have no chance to solve the educational or technical problem until the positioning problem is solved first. We need to position measurement as a practical leadership tool, one that strengthens strategic clarity, decision confidence, alignment, and credibility. Then, leaders don’t just support it – they lean in, ask better questions, and take ownership of measuring what matters most.
So, how can we position measurement as an answer to that question, “How does this help me lead?” The reasons below capture the most common leadership motivations behind successful measurement initiatives. These reasons provide a practical lens strategy performance practitioners can use to position their work in ways leaders are far more likely to support:
- Making strategy easier to communicate, translate and align.
- Feeling a sense of control over the destiny of the organisation or company.
- Strengthening cohesion and clarity in their leadership team.
- Managing stakeholder relationships more confidently.
- Proving they have the qualities of high-performing leadership.
1. Making strategy easier to communicate, translate and align.
Matt is the Director of a government agency focused on consumer rights. And one of the reasons why Matt supports performance measurement is that it helped him to clearly define what success meant for this organisation. He led his executive team to clearly articulate their strategic goals, and then engage teams to align their goals to these (they used PuMP’s Results Map). And he found something he never had before: a way to engage everyone in the strategic direction.
Matt called the Results Map the “Where’s Wally” diagram (you might be more familiar with “Where’s Waldo”). He explained that once Wally was found in the map, Wally knew where they fit into the organisation. Everyone could see the goals they directly contributed to, and how those goals linked up to contribute to the organisation’s overall purpose.
In strategy execution frameworks today, measurement makes strategy real for every layer of the organization (not just executives). It’s a translation mechanism from abstract goals to everyday action. Measuring success makes it far easier to communicate, and have people understand, the organisation’s strategy and purpose.
Without a consistent framework for measuring performance that is explicitly and clearly linked to the overall strategy and anchored in strategic goals, organizational units often don’t understand what is expected of them to achieve strategic alignment. – PwC
Try this:
Demonstrate to leaders how measurement isn’t just data, but rather a mechanism to make strategy tangible. Take one strategic goal, and write it clearly and measurably. Build a line of sight of connected goals, all clear and measurable, from this strategic goal, down through the layers of the organisation to a single team. Give each goal a meaningful KPI to make that line of sight even more tangible.
2. Feeling a sense of control over the destiny of the organisation or company.
Dell is the Executive Director of Renew Behavioral Health and Wellness in Grant County in Washington State. When Dell took on this role, he found himself in an organisation that had no strategy, no evidence of how it was performing, and perceptions in the community that weren’t all that terrific. With a measurement-centric approach, he led his team to turn this around and pursue a new, bold vision to become a model of excellence.
The term ‘excellence’ is interesting because I have functioned from a place where I’ve liked to see improvement. But moving through this process [PuMP], that’s how I’ve learned what excellence really is. And it’s this ability and flexibility that you have to continuously improve upon your processes and really begin that journey. – Dell Anderson, Executive Director of Renew Behavioral Health and Wellness
Leaders today want predictive insight and early warning signals, not just lagging results. They support measurement that directly shows them their strategic progress, so they can have more confidence in their decisions about where to invest time and resources. Measuring and tracking both activity and result progress helps leaders to feel in control – and sleep soundly at night because they know what’s going on and how they’re addressing it.
Try this:
Show leaders how the right progress measures can boost their confidence to act through greater comfort from knowing. For one strategic priority goal, draft a set of the four types of progress measures to show them how they can understand how activity is leading to results and how current efforts are building longer-term leverage.
3. Strengthening shared accountability and collective execution.
John is a Managing Director of a family-owned manufacturing company. One of his strongest reasons for supporting (and championing) performance measurement was the power it gave him to build shared accountability and collective execution within his team of General Managers. Developing measures of success together, he saw how easy it was to check the level of shared understanding of goals and priorities, and each of his executive’s roles in executing these within their own departments.
When the team reflected on what each of them felt about their finished Results Map and strategic measures, John leant back in his chair, paused in silence for a few seconds, and then said:
I now have 12 people to communicate and lead our strategy across our company… it’s not just me anymore. – John, Managing Director of family-owned manufacturing company
When leaders co-define what success looks like, and share the evidence base to monitor for that success, they also co-own execution. Here, measurement builds a type of shared accountability that strengthens trust and reduces the blame culture.
Try this:
Invite leaders to allow you to lead them through a collaborate process to more clearly define what success looks like for one of their trickier strategic priorities. Guide them to articulate a measurable goal, a meaningful KPI (or two), and a target that anchors that success in reality. Bring the KPI to life for them, ideally in a Smart Chart, and reconvene to explore how they can collaborate to move the KPI closer to its target.
4. Managing stakeholder relationships more confidently.
Hanlie is the Associate Director of Public Library Services in a State Library. Hanlie’s performance framework became the credible evidence-based tool she and other partners with the library use to engage with corporate and public funders and enhance the position of public libraries in the social infrastructure offered by local and state governments.
For example, one of their regional country libraries used the performance framework to lobby for additional funding for literacy and learning programs. They selected a few outcomes and measures from the performance framework and built a compelling case that not only won their additional program funding, but also a funded new position to coordinate library programs.
I’m currently working with my interstate colleagues to explore the value of perhaps a national approach to how public libraries use and collect our data in future. I can just visualize the value, if we collectively harness our strengths to tell our important story to our funders and decision makers… that we can reach wider audiences, achieve more significant results. – Hanlie Erasmus, Associate Director of Public Library Services, State Library of South Australia
Try this:
Discuss with leaders what information is useful to communicate to stakeholders to win more support, versus what information is useful to manage strategic progress internally. There’s a difference, and making that clear can help remove the unnecessary fear of transparency that often comes with stakeholder reporting.
5. Proving they have the qualities of high-performing leadership.
Peter, the manager of a procurement department in a government-owned utility, was able to demonstrate his management capability through achievement of some very aggressive performance targets.
Cost reduction was a strategic priority for the utility, and Peter used a structured measurement approach to save the organisation $40M in only two years. He and his procurement team objectively demonstrated this saving by diligently measuring and tracking their procurement strategy. Peter was soon appointed to a senior executive position within the organisation.
Leaders who systemically embed measurement demonstrate strategic leadership, evidence-based decision making, and execution discipline—all qualities that define high-performing leadership in the 2020s.
To lead an organisation to high performance, a strong emphasis must be given to the role of evidence. Evidence-based leaders pursue high performance by speeding up the cycle of closing performance gaps — the gaps between where the organisation’s performance is right now, and where they want it to be. This is why evidence-based leaders give a lot of attention to results-based performance measures. – Stacey Barr, Prove It!
Try this:
Help leaders build an evidence-based story of success. Even without the improved measurement approach you want your leaders to adopt, there is still evidence-based success to be found in what they’ve already accomplished. Re-telling this success story with relevant evidence to accompany the results can set the example for the power of more deliberately adopting measurement as a strategic tool.
Educating leaders isn’t the first step.
The most effective way to gain executive support for measurement is not to start with measures at all, but with leadership needs. When measurement is framed as a means to clearer strategy, stronger decisions, and better accountability, leaders quickly see its relevance.
Which leader is struggling with one of those five challenges listed above? How can you position performance measurement differently to them, so you’re emphasising the benefits they care about, rather than the features you care about?