To manage performance, we often need a mix of lead and lag measures, for a collection of goals. But how do we blend lead and lag measures together in our performance dashboard, without making it too cluttered?
Firstly, let’s be clear about what leading measures really are. From this article on my public blog, Measure Up, I define them like this:
“They are a special breed of performance measure or KPI because they have predictive power… Now this relationship is not quite the same as any other cause-effect relationship. There’s usually a time lag, so when your lead indicator behaves differently, the lag indicator won’t start changing until some time in the future. And that’s where the power of the lead indicator lies!”
Because lead measures tend to sit further out in the Results Map to their related lag measures, they might belong to a different team, or a completely different part of the organisation. So, technically, they belong on a performance dashboard owned by another team.
But because they provide extra insight into the lag measures you might be monitoring in your performance dashboard, what can you do?
Option 1: Include the priority lead indicators in your performance dashboard.
This is an obvious decision if your team also owns the lead measures for the performance results you have focused your performance dashboard to report on. They’ll automatically be included both on your dashboard front-page and also each have their own detailed page.
But what if other teams own some of the lead measures for your lag measures? Any of those lead indicators could be vitally important to how you need to respond to a lag measure that’s not tracking toward its target. Or vitally important to get early warnings if a lag measure is facing an imminent threat to its performance. In these cases, it might be useful to include the most important lead indicators in your performance report, even if they’re owned by others. But make sure you flag this on your performance dashboard, like naming the team that owns each lead indicator.
Option 2: Just link to the priority lead indicators from your performance dashboard.
If your dashboard is getting too cluttered by including all the relevant lead measures (whether your team owns them or not), perhaps keep the priority lead measures on the dashboard and link to the rest, from within the interpretation or response sections for your lag measures. You can keep more detail for each lead measure elsewhere in your performance report, like those individual measure worksheets we use in the PuMP Performance Dashboard Excel template.
Or if you have an automated dashboard system (not the Excel starting point we provide you with your PuMP training), then you can dynamically link directly to the other teams’ lead indicators. In this case, it’s like having a dynamic Results Map, and you can click through to any other measure that has a relationship to the measures under your team’s ownership.
Option 3: Collaborate with the lead indicator owners and include in commentary only.
Probably the easiest way to make use of lead indicators that your team doesn’t own, is to collaborate with the teams that do own them. This is part of PuMP’s philosophy: to collaborate across organisational boundaries. It means having dialogue with other teams to share the ideas and responsibility for improving important organisational results.
When you’re undertaking this type of cross-boundary or cross-silo collaboration, you’re sharing the interpretation and response to one of your lag measures with the owners of the lead measures. After you’ve done this, you’ll have actions to report on in your performance dashboard, against the lag measure on which these collaborations are focused.
In other words, there’s no need to include the XmR charts for the lead measures you don’t own. Rather, you focus on using both the lead and lag measures together, with a cross-functional team that collectively owns them, to collaborate on a solution.
Keep your performance dashboards flexible.
It’s a change in mindset though, to make a performance dashboard flexible enough to put focus where focus is most needed, at any point in time. A quarterly rhythm might be a good start, to review and refresh which measures (lead or lag) that need to be on the front dashboard page, or can move to the background with linking, or move into action with cross-functional collaboration.
These are just my ideas, but if you’re dealing with this situation, or already have, please share your experience and suggestions in the comments!