The Human Side of Measuring Success

Cristina Amigoni: The experience that we want to see if we can reach is can we get to the point faster and reduce the number of tangents? 

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

Both: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself. Not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills. No makeup. Just being.”

[EPISODE]

Cristina Amigoni: Well, hello. 

Alex Cullimore: Hello. We are here to talk about – actually, it's just the two of us today. We get to talk about whatever we want. And what we wanted to cover is one thing that keeps coming up in both corporate world. And I think people get kind of hung up on this in life in general. And that's measures of success. And what does it mean to plot out a goal and to really think about what the future will look like if you're working towards something? What does it actually look like to have succeeded in moving into that thing and having achieved that new state of being, new behaviors, new organizations, new processes? Whatever it is that they are changing. What does it mean to have a measure of success? There's a lot kind of, I think, to unpack in this. Where do you want to start? 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, our own measure of success for this episode and some future ones. We'll see how – 

Alex Cullimore: Getting the right microphone.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Getting the right microphone. Well, I'm done. That's it. Mic drop. The episode can end. We've tested that already. Now, the bigger measure of success is we are starting an experiment to see if we can stop talking randomly for long periods of time. And so, that translates into trying to record 15 to 20-minute episodes, which we will call successful after 25 minutes. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: Without intro and outro.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's our measure of success. And that's an interesting one, because that one is very tangible. There's kind of a definitive line there. If we go over 25 minutes, then we've gone past our goal here. And it's not to say it necessarily is a failure. But the goal here is to get a little more succinct. Get into our groove and deliver exactly what we want to deliver quickly. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: And, ironically, one of the things we keep thinking of when we think of measures of success is not making them as numeric as we tend to think of them. And now, we've just established a numeric measure of success. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, I could argue that the numeric measure of success could be, "Oh, if we do this for 100 episodes straight, that could be a numeric. Then we could could claim success." However, if we do that as a goal, which could be a goal. But if we do that as a goal, we're not taking into account all the possible things that could happen between now and 100 episodes in. Part of them being we just don't like to talk less. 

Alex Cullimore: That's totally fair.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Ironically, if we dive down that rabbit hole, we're definitely gonna blow past our 25 minutes.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. For now, the measure is short episodes. And the big thing that can get us there is the why, which you just explained. Trying to get more succinct. Getting to the point, which we're clearly failing already. That's why we need more measures of success for one goal. Getting to the point much quicker. And, also, just be able to – we have a lot of topics we want to talk about. And, hopefully, part of an idea that I had when I thought about this – because these are usually the random ideas I come up with. I'm like, "Oh, let's do this." And it was just to be able to actually churn through a lot more topics and record a lot more while we have some slower times as summer ends. Because we know how it can just turn and become very busy very quickly and then it becomes harder to find time to record. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. And that actually I think just ties us back to the episode. Is a good portion of measures of success when we think about – we have to have that big why in mind. We have to have that big journey in mind. Because the idea is not just to set a bunch of – and this is why I think numeric ones can be challenging. If we do 25, we can call ourselves successful by cutting ourselves off mid-sentence maybe. That might be a problem. But we would then be successful. 

But the real why is just getting to all the things you just said. If we know that it's a lot easier to make better decisions along the way, and when we set up metrics of success, that's an idea. And that's part of what the overall measures are. Are we going on too many rabbit holes? Am I repeating myself too often? Am I now in a new circle of speech right now where I'm just circling on what we've started? If I do too many of those, that might be a measure of success that I've done now. Too many of those. Or I need to reduce those. These are all ancillary and good ideas, good mile markers that help us know whether we're making progress on a goal and whether we are in the right path to success. And that's why it's so important to set up accurate metric of success. And be careful and be ready to adjust them on the fly. Because you might be incentivizing the wrong things.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Definitely. It also would have helped if we actually looked at the clock and had a timer to tell us if we're in the 25 minutes. But we'll get there. It's the first one. It's a learning curve. Yes, all of those things are very much needed. 

One of the things that I think is important when looking at measure of success is peeling the onion. Not just making it a surface thing. Because that's the tendency. Oh, if we have a number and it's a surface thing, everybody's interpretation of that means this. Well, not really. And, also, are you actually measuring what matters? 

If we're talking about anything from team's productivity. If your measure of success is how fast teams get onboarded and that measure in a metric system is – well, metric, European. But, also, in data number system. Not behavior. Is around, "Oh, we want everybody to be on boarded within the first two days of joining a team." Yes, you could go through the task. You could have a checklist and say like, "Yep, done it all." 

And then when three weeks later, nobody's talking to each other, did you actually succeed in onboarding the team? Are they a team? Is the measure that they become a team that talks to each other and are productive together? Or is the measure is that you can go through the tasks in two days or less? 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Have they been assigned a manager and put at a desk that is next to the rest of their team? That could be onboarding. You could be done at that point. But if you really want like a cohesive team of very – you want people to jump on board and be providing value quickly, that's a different onboarding than just we've checked this off. 

And it reminds me of the one that we see often. And it's easy to fall into this. And I get why people do it. People go in and companies go into, "We have too many meetings. Let's try and reduce the number of meetings on a calendar." And you can absolutely measure that. You can say, like, "I had 20 meetings. And I realized these three weren't important. Now I have 17 meetings." That's great. These tend to come from companies that also have communication gaps and people are missing information. 

And so, meetings might not be the efficient way to do it. But more efficient meetings would be the way to do it. Are you measuring the number of meetings? Or are you measuring the efficiency of the meetings? And what does that mean? Or do we have the right people in the room? What are the actual metrics you need to define so that you have communication happening effectively rather than feeling like everybody has too many meetings to do anything? Or they have too few meetings. They don't know what's going on. Just saying we have too many meetings and trying to reduce that or taking team meetings off the calendar because that's the one we can control. That doesn't necessarily give you the outcomes you want. You're not going to align. You're not going to communicate. And you might entirely miss the boat of we do need to communicate better. And we feel like we're losing time.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting, because when we just look at numbers as the measures of success, then we tend to lose – well, we lose the fact that we're humans. And until proven differently, we don't all fit in the same box. There is no nuance of what could be actually happening included in those numbers. 

Qualitative data is just as important, if not more than quantitative data. And so, that's where, when we are looking for measures of success for ourselves, but also when we ask others to come up with them, we're not necessarily looking at numbers. How many meetings were efficient? Because now you're going down the rabbit hole of actually thinking about what efficiency is. Everybody has a different interpretation. And you're just introduced a human element to a number that's never going to be where you actually want it to be. But we look at what is the experience and the behavior that we want to recognize in the future state when we've reached the goal? 

If we go back to our shorter episodes, the experience that we want to see if we can reach is can we get to the point faster and reduce the number of tangents. It's not really about the 25 minutes. We're not going to say, if it's 25.5, we failed. It is about can we get to the point faster and record more episodes so that we're ready for the busy times? 

Alex Cullimore: And just deliver more succinct, specific dots. That's just we can do piecemeal stuff instead of a few things at the same time. And that'll give us just a little bit of leg up on focus. And so, these are the goals that we have. And the behaviors we want to see is our own focuses, our own drive, our own – and then that cascades into an easier building of a backlog of episodes, etc. Those are the important ones to measure. And it's so easy to measure the wrong thing and end up incentivizing the wrong thing. 

I do want to introduce an idea though, of getting from what can sound like quantitative data into qualitative data. And that's one thing that we were introduced to in learning to coach people is the idea of a scaling question. I'm asking how is this on a scale of 1 to 10? And that suddenly provides a baseline for things. You could even say, "As a team, do we effectively communicate?" One being we don't communicate at all. 10 being we're super effective at our communication. 

And people will give their answers and it gives them an immediate chance to reflect some color on that. Like, "Oh, I feel like we're at a seven, because I feel like there's times where our meetings are wandering too long, and I miss that. Or I miss important points. Or there's too many things, multitasking. I try. I get distracted by that. Or I noticed that I'm not getting replies to my emails." Whatever those might be. You're going to get a bunch of little examples that suddenly give you a foothold into what to do to improve that. You can take your baseline as people's just subjective view of, "I feel like a seven out of 10 on that." And get both information on why they didn't choose a 10. And what might make it a 10? And, suddenly, you have actionable things to work on. And that can start to define your measures of success of, "Oh, we need to kind of make sure that we're realigned at the end of meetings. Or that everybody's walking away with the same understanding." Or whatever it might be. Those can start to fall out of what sounds like a quantitative measure. But is trying to give a quantity to something qualitative. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. That's an excellent example. Again, we're not saying that numbers are wrong. And we're not saying that there isn't a place for numbers, and data, and concrete data, quantitative data for measures of success. It's just more about does that give you the opening and the space to really figure out what needs to be happening? To peel the onion. To understand what the behaviors in the future state are going to be? To understand what that experience in the future state was going to be. Because just the numbers are not going to do it. And just the numbers don't actually give you the full story. 

I was just thinking about, for example, the difference between churning tables in restaurants in Europe versus the US. And even in Italy, it's different depending on where you are. And so, you can be in a restaurant – most of the times in a restaurant in Italy, you don't actually get the check unless you ask for it. And then especially if you're not in a high tourist area, the idea is sit there all night long. Their measure of success as a restaurant is not how many tables they can turn. It's not getting in as many guests as possible. Their measure of success usually, especially in non-touristy areas, is can we create loyalty? So that this customer who lives here comes back to us every time they think about going out to eat. That is their measure of success. That is more valuable than churning tables. 

If you are in Rome or in a high tourist area, well, the chances that you're going to get the people that live there to go back to that same restaurant are not very high. So maybe your measure of success is churning tables as fast as possible. Because you have a huge line outside and you want as many people to be able to eat. And those people are going to be gone tomorrow because they're just tourists. 

Establishing what is the intrin – the core motivation for the numbers that you're looking for is what's needed. And that is definitely harder of a conversation and harder to get alignment around than just saying it's this. It's how fast can teams get onboarded. This is the measure of success for every single team in every single division in our 450,000-person company. Is it?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. What are the chances that that one size fits all? And even if it does, there's really a huge importance in re-evaluating the measures as you go. Not only because you might have totally gotten it right the first time on this is something that is worth pursuing. You might find out the way people are pursuing that isn't what you're looking for. And I think the first example I could easily come up with that hopefully people can relate to is the GE example where Jack Welch would be like, "Well, the bottom 10% are getting fired every year." Okay.

Presumably, that's looking for maintaining high performers and keeping people around who are above the 10% mark. What in reality that ends up looking like is people making sure they can backstab each other enough if they feel like they're anywhere close to 11%. They're going to make sure that that other person is down. They're going to go juice the stats or work on whatever is being measured to give them that ranking and work on that instead. 

And that happens in schools, too. We see that with like class rankings. I've seen a number of people who go load their schedule up with AP classes because those are better-weighted GPAs. And then are you encouraging people learning and being smarter? You're encouraging just whatever needs to happen. Including things like cheating on tests to make sure you get an A on that. To make sure you keep your score up. To make sure all of these behaviors that presumably you probably don't want and weren't looking to encourage, you may end up seeing based on what you've chosen to measure. And so, it's really important to go re-evaluate. Even if you are pretty sure you've got a good set of things to measure, to re-evaluate continually whether this is really driving people the way we were hoping that it would. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. And interestingly enough, it is the qualitative data of changed behaviors and changed experience that then delivers the numbers that may be what we're looking for down the line. If you think about the fact that, as humans, we have a thought, we then develop a feeling around that thought, and then the action follows whatever we're feeling. Because our feelings determine our actions. And our outcome is determined by our actions, which really are determined by how we feel when it comes down to it. 

And so, think about even things as – when you switch the question to measures of success ahead of actually starting to work on a goal. And you switch it from data and numbers to behavior and experiences, the answers most of the time are about feelings. Well, I will feel less reactive in a meeting if I reach my goal. I will feel that we are communicating more and I'm more connected to the team. And, therefore, I don't have to avoid conflict. 

Very few times, you actually don't hear the word feeling come into play when you're talking about a future behavior. And then you can look at what happens. You feel more connected as a team. You're not avoiding conflict anymore, which means things are resolved faster. Critical incidents or any type of issue is brought up right away before it's even an issue instead of after the fact. And that, down the line, translates into faster turnaround for projects. Less customer support needed. And all those things that actually do matter for the bottom line financially. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. And they're only possible through that original effort and that original dedication to those things that need to – the behaviors and the feelings that need to be put in place. So that the actions are taken. So that the outcomes can be delivered. And that's where you get those bottom-line results. 

That take a little while and are really hard to tie back to when and how each of these things change. And I think that's why we default so often to trying to create numeric measures. Because we're like, "Oh, we'll see the progress." And you might also be looking at entirely the wrong thing. And that might be very short-term progress. We need to deliver more software features. Well, people might start to just break down software features into smaller chunks. And, suddenly, you're delivering more features. But you're not getting any better results on the customer side. 

Or I think, to your example, sometimes we hear in organizations, "Well, the measure of success will be if our boss stops having complaints elevated to them essentially." And then they kind of laugh and they're like, "Oh, that can't be a measure of success." 

Cristina Amigoni: It's actually a pretty good one.

Alex Cullimore: Actually, it'd be a pretty good one. As long as it's not like, "Well, let's hold and suppress all of our problems and make sure they don't get elevated." So, then you have to measure like our problems actually addressed and not at this level. And then if you start to see that that is going down and the volume of things that are raising to that level that don't need to be raising to that level has decreased, it might not be a easy numeric measure to drive out. But it will be a feeling. And you can divide some metrics in there. Like, "Oh, it used to be like three a month. And now we're seeing less than that." Or the ones that are raised even if it is three still just aren't that big a deal. It's just something that just like, "It just happened to pop up this time. And we get dismissed." It's not a bad idea to have a metric success that is a feeling like that or that is like, "Oh, this isn't being escalated." 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah. Which is the same thing as, when you're driving your car, you don't actually have pay attention to anything that may not be working until it stops working the way it's intended. Smooth sailing. Not hearing the squeaky wheel is measure of success. Because it means that my wheel is not coming off.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That is a really good point. The real success, when you feel like everything's banging on all cylinders, to extend the metaphor, is literally that your cylinders aren't exploding. It's not squealing. The brakes aren't hissing. Whatever it is. Those are all running smoothly. And it's harder to notice because you're not experiencing friction. We notice friction. It takes more effort to notice the absence of something than to notice the presence of a problem. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah. I think we're my sum time. But it feels like about 20 minutes. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. The one piece that I would add just – and we've given ourselves the leeway to get to 25, is just a one fun one that we came across that has been helpful in giving people both self-assurance as well as giving their teams. And that is the idea of the comfort to growth chart. It's one that we found online. We don't actually know where the origination of this model is. Because there's too many replicas out there. 

But the idea is this kind of expanding zones from your comfort zone, to your fear zone, to your learning zone, to your growth zone. And kind of different attributes that fall under those. And you can map yourself. You can map a team in relation to their job or in relation to a specific change that's going on right now. And that is very subjective quantitative data which ends up being incredibly useful. You can trend this over time. Somebody might be in fear one day and they start to get to learning the next. And these are helpful zones to kind of think about. And that's just one that I would encourage people to look at if you're looking for a good gradation of what is not fully quantitative and a good qualitative measure of success when you're moving things, and you're changing things, and we want to see growth.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. And it is a popular one. And once you look at it, the idea there is to subjectively observe what's happening and based on the behaviors that are related to the fear zone, the learning zone, the comfort zone, and the growth zone. Because if we are expecting people to – for example, in the growth zone, is a lot of innovation, new ideas, looking at the future, driving a team there, but somebody is in fear, that's when we can then step back and look at the human side and say like, "Hey, we can actually expect that person to be innovating." 

If, right now, because of what's happening and because of where they're at is in the fear, protective mode of, "I don't know where my role is. I don't understand what's going on. I'm defaulting to older behavior because that was a success in the past." It really helps with combining that there is some quantitative data in the fact that we are showing where people are. And the qualitative is like what's going on there? And what can we expect from those people? From the people depending on where they plot themselves or they're observed to be plotted. But, also, what can we do to help them? None of the zones are good or bad. Is that where we want them to be? Is that the behavior we want to see? Because if it's not, what can be done? And that's where we bring in the human element of this is what can be done.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Also, a good way of disarming that feeling of like the tendency we have to be like, "Oh, that person's always going to be like that." No. They might just be – have they been like that before? Maybe not. Why are there now? And what can change? It gives you a huge leg up, like you said, on knowing what to expect from them and what might help them adjust. If an adjustment is needed or if it's desired? 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It opens up that space, that conversation. Just like the 1 to 10 scales. Like, now we can actually have a conversation. As opposed to just check a box.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I guess the real moral here is think about the behaviors. Think about the connective pieces. Think about the big why. And make sure those are continually checked in with and aligned as you go through any kind of change for yourself or for a group. Those are good measures of success to go look at measures of success to go see and to see if you're making the right progress. And continue to check in on those so that you don't end up selling your goal short.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah. Big one, for sure. Establishing before you start. And then checking to see if that's where you're marching. And does it still matter? Or does it need to change? Have that flexibility.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: All right. Well, enjoy.

Alex Cullimore: Go forth and succeed. 

[OUTRO]

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human, a Siamo podcast. 

Alex Cullimore: Special thanks to our podcast operations wizard, Jake Lara; and our score creator, Rachel Sherwood. 

Cristina Amigoni: If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review, and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Alex Cullimore: We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas, or questions. You can reach us at podcast@wearesiamo.com, or at our website, WeAreSiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. We Are Siamo is spelled W-E A-R-E S-I-A-M-O.

Cristina Amigoni: Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others, and always uncover the human.

[END]