The metric you choose communicates to your organization what’s important to you (the POWERFUL person). It communicates to them how their personal success will be measured. That translates directly into what they prioritize when it comes to your digital initiatives.
Choose the right metric and they’ll create the most glorious digital experience in the universe, the perfect acquisition campaign, the most amazing customer service channel. And they will shock you with the profits they deliver.
Choose the wrong one and they’ll create self-serving, sub optimal, non-competitive, tear-inducing outcomes that will, slowly over time, bleed the business to death.
It really is that stark. Simply because it all comes down to the incentives you create.
Don’t believe me?
Let’s look at six corrosive metrics and their angelic twins, which illustrate this challenge – and magnificent opportunity – quite vividly.
1. Page Views vs. Visitor Loyalty
Is there anything easier than measuring Page Views? This metric has been in every tool since we started torturing web server logs to measure hits (!).
What does Page Views measure? It kinda sorta measures consumption. It is hard to know if a lot of Page Views per visit is a good thing (“The visitor loved our site so much that they read 23 pages of content!”) or a bad thing (“Our site is so horrible that it took 23 pages for the visitor to find what they were looking for”) or a horrible thing (“After 23 page hunt the visitor gave up, cursed us, abandoned the site, and went on to tweet to 23,000 followers that we stink”).
When you look at 23 Page Views, how do you know which of the above three was the outcome?
But it gets worse.
Most content sites are currently monetized using display advertising, most commonly on a Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) basis. When you are paid on a CPM basis the incentive is to figure out how to show the most possible ads on every page (“mo ads mo impressions!”) and…. ensure the visitor sees the most possible pages on the site (“mo ads mo impressions mo page views mo money!”).
That incentive removes a focus from the important entity, your customer, and places it on the secondary entity, your advertiser.
It does not take a degree in rocket science to see what happens next. The web is littered with examples of this awfulness.
For organizations to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, leaders have to learn how to build a culture of trust and openness. Here are four strategies to help in this regard:
- Encourage risk taking – Leaders need to take the first step in extending trust to those they lead. Through their words and actions, leaders can send the message that appropriate and thoughtful risk taking is encouraged and rewarded. When people feel trusted and secure in their contributions to the organization, they don’t waste energy engaging in CYA (cover your “assets”) behavior and are willing to risk failure. The willingness to take risks is the genesis of creativity and innovation, without which organizations today will die on the vine. Creating a culture of risk taking will only be possible when practice #2 is in place.
- View mistakes as learning opportunities – Imagine that you’re an average golfer (like me!) who decides to take lessons to improve your game. After spending some time on the practice range, your instructor takes you on the course for some live action and you attempt a high-risk/high-reward shot. You flub the shot and your instructor goes beserk on you. “How stupid can you be!” he shouts. “What were you thinking? That was one of the worst shots I’ve seen in my life!” Not exactly the kind of leadership that encourages you to take further risks, is it? Contrast that with a response of “So what do you think went wrong? What will you do differently next time?” Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40, characterizes these incidents as “learning moments,” where planning and execution come together, a result is produced, and we incorporate what we learned into our future work.
- Build transparency into processes and decision making – Leaders can create a culture of trust and openness by making sure they engage in transparent business practices. Creating systems for high involvement in change efforts, openly discussing decision-making critieria, giving and receiving feedback, and ensuring organizational policies and procedures and applied fairly and equitably are all valuable strategies to increase transparency. On an individual basis, it’s important for us leaders to remember that our people want to know our values, beliefs, and what motivates our decisions and actions. Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines, likes to say that “People will respect you for what you know, but they’ll love you for your vulnerabilities.”
