“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
—T.S. Eliot, from “The Four Quartets”
It can feel overwhelming and intimidating to evaluate someone’s performance – your own, a staff member’s, or your team’s. It may help to know that there are only two essential categories to observe: effort (aka, actions) or effect (aka, outcomes).
I’ve mentioned these measures before as part of a larger framework (Friedman 2018), but they’re worth a closer look on their own.
Effort captures how hard you tried: actions taken, investments made, and resources deployed. As examples: rehearsal hours logged, donor meetings held, proposals submitted, social media posted. Effort is (largely) within your control, observable, and usually assignable to a particular team member.
Effect captures the outcomes, impacts, and results associated with those efforts: event attendance, dollars given, communities changed. Effect is outside your direct control and difficult to trace back to specific action or person. But effect is actually what you’re after as an individual, team, or organization.
Economists use a similar sorting to distinguish “leading indicators” (measures that anticipate economic activity) from “lagging indicators” (measures that trail economic activity). Each has utility in predicting and responding to complex systems. Each has blind spots, as well.
In evaluating performance, the trick is to find a healthy balance between effort and effect. It doesn’t help that the simplest things to observe and measure in both categories are not generally the most useful.
It’s easy and common, for example, to overvalue effort measures: long hours worked, checklists checked, busy feelings felt, continuous exhaustion endured. If you and your team emphasize effort, your days can become performative or perfunctory when you might be better off doing less, better.
Even when measuring effect, it’s easy and common to count things (tickets sold, dollars earned, gifts received) rather than search for qualitative indicators (reduced suffering, increased joy, deeper connection, piqued curiosity). Since you can never know whether a desired effect is causally connected to a specific effort, the deeper goal is to learn where those two track together, and to interrogate the quality of effort and effect rather than just the quantity (Friedman 2018).
Sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963) wrote that:
…not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
And yet, it’s essential to discover, discern, and discuss whether our efforts foster the effects we’re looking for. That requires an on-going and open conversation about what performance means for your organization, and what interplay of effort and effect moves you forward.
Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash
Sources
Cameron, William Bruce. 1963. Informal Sociology, a Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking. Random House Studies in Sociology. Random House.
Friedman, Mark. 2018. Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Produce Measurable Improvements for Customers and Communities. 3rd edition. Parse Publishing.
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