Managers, not everything important can be quantified
Many modern managers (in the name of “execution”) have become obsessed with quantifying EVERYTHING…
From financials, to sales outreaches, to cultural health, to how customers feel.
Are all these metrics bad? No. Absolutely not.
Like many mid-market businesses, we track a TON of them here at STL.
The problem, I think, is that not EVERYTHING that is important in a business really can be quantified. Or even should be.
For three reasons:
1) Quantifying can be very difficult
We need look no further than American politics to see just how often survey data is completely wrong...
And customer and employee polls are quite frequently no better.
It's actually very hard to create truly "safe" spaces for honest feedback, especially when a stakeholder fears that their honesty may have consequences.
Humans are also remarkably bad at predicting their own behavior, even when they are trying to be as honest as they can be.
2) Quantifying can be very time-intensive
A second problem is that quantifying can be very time-intensive.
Sales CRMs are a great example of this...
How many companies build the coolest, "bells and whistles stocked" sales system...
Only to struggle to get their reps to put in even 20% of their information?
Most.
Sure, maybe some of the blame for this needs to be assigned to reps.
But, the real problem (as I see it) is that inputting information often takes a really, really long time.
Especially if it can't be automated, it's very expensive and difficult to pull off. And pulls teams away from the actual work that is being tracked.
3) Quantifying can be counter-productive
A great example of this is customer feedback surveys.
While most customers are happy to occasionally answer questions about their experience with our team...
Doing this too often can annoy them. And worse, can potentially lead customers to be more negative than they normally would be.
Does this mean we should stop quantifying? No, I don't think so. We just have to be smart about it.
We need to pay attention to cases where the quantifying is actually counterproductive, possibly inaccurate, or too difficult to be worth the effort.
In these cases, our gut feel will be right more than it's wrong. And we should rely on it.