Breakfast Is (Not) Served

I’m an early riser, whether at home or on the road. In the latter case, I am normally out of bed early enough that I can read my Bible and spend time in prayer, and still arrive in the hotel breakfast area when it opens. On a recent trip, when I walked into the breakfast area, none of the hot food was ready.  I don’t know the cause of the delay, but I observed a brief exchange between the manager and the employee responsible for breakfast. It was obvious that there was a “performance issue” that was being addressed. Measuring and managing the performance of staff members is an ongoing challenge for most leaders, especially in ministries and non-profit organizations. I say “especially” because we’re often dealing with less tangible indicators of performance. It’s easy to determine if breakfast is ready on time. It’s very difficult to know if teens in a youth group are truly growing in their faith or if the worship music prepared the hearts of the congregation to hear the sermon. In the face of these measurement difficulties, some leaders choose not to measure anything. Of course, this turns performance management into a rather meaningless exercise. Some leaders will press ahead with vague feedback that a staff member is or isn’t doing a good job. The staff member may know how he or she is rated, but has no idea how to change that rating. Other leaders simply abandon any effort at feedback. This reduces their management to giving directives. A different kind of mistake is to create metrics that don’t measure what matters. The youth ministry can easily set a goal for the number of kids who attend camp in the summer, but will you be satisfied with the long-term results if you achieve this goal? In fact, I wonder if “on-time breakfast” should be an important metric for my hotel. Shouldn’t their real concern be guest satisfaction? If the manager and breakfast staff person had simply apologized for the delay and asked how they could help, I would have understood and appreciated their concern. So far, I’ve mostly raised questions. If you’re looking for magical answers, don’t turn to me because I don’t believe that they exist. But I do believe that each of us, in our own context, need to wrestle with measurement questions. If not, the consequences will be much worse than a late breakfast. P.S. Patrick Lencioni has some great thoughts on the problem of “immeasurement” in his book, Three Signs of a Miserable Job. And if having the hard conversations about performance is an issue in your organization, you may be interested in my PerformanceCompass workshop. It’s easy to receive my blogs by email. Just sign-up on Feedburner by clicking here.]]>