Most leaders spend a surprising amount of time reviewing activity and relatively little time examining results.
We discuss projects, review budgets, track assignments, and work through operational problems. Meetings are full, calendars are crowded, and everyone has plenty to report.
But here's a question worth asking: Is all this activity actually making the organization better?
There's an important difference between knowing what your people are doing and knowing whether what they're doing is working.
Consider a nonprofit that's struggling to grow its fundraising revenue. Leadership meetings might spend considerable time reviewing expense reports, debating minor purchases, and ensuring everyone follows the organization's financial procedures. Those things matter. Money deserves careful stewardship.
But if the organization's real problem is that it's losing donors and failing to develop new relationships, better expense reporting isn't going to solve it.
You can run a very tidy organization right into financial trouble.
The challenge for senior leaders is distinguishing between the things that need to be managed and the things that actually drive success. Both deserve attention, but they don't deserve equal attention from everyone.
A department manager might appropriately spend time correcting small procedural problems. The executive director, meanwhile, needs to know whether donor retention is improving, whether major gift conversations are advancing, and whether the organization is building the financial support required for its mission.
That's why regular performance reviews are so important. Not the kind where everyone takes turns describing how busy they've been, but conversations that compare what we intended to accomplish with what's actually happening.
We said we'd increase donor retention. Did we?
We planned to reduce employee turnover. Has it improved?
We committed to expanding a program. Are we reaching more people, and are those people better served?
When the answer is no, the next question isn't necessarily who's responsible. It's what we've learned and what needs to change.
These conversations need to happen on a predictable schedule. Otherwise, they tend to disappear beneath whatever crisis happens to be making the most noise that week.
And there's always a crisis willing to volunteer.
A disciplined monthly or quarterly review gives managers an opportunity to look beyond the immediate demands of their departments. It forces everyone to consider whether current efforts are producing the intended results, whether assumptions still hold, and whether resources need to move.
It also helps prevent a particularly expensive organizational habit: continuing to do something simply because we've been doing it for years.
Of course, none of this means that everything important can be reduced to a number. Trust, organizational culture, leadership development, and mission effectiveness often require thoughtful judgment alongside measurable indicators. But difficulty measuring something doesn't excuse us from examining whether it's improving.
Here's a practical exercise for your next leadership meeting.
Ask each senior manager to identify the two or three outcomes that matter most to their department's contribution to the organization. Then ask three questions:
What did we expect to accomplish by now?
What has actually happened?
What are we going to do differently as a result?
Don't let the conversation become another round of activity reports. Keep bringing it back to results.
And pay particular attention to the third question. Measurement without adjustment is just recordkeeping.
Ultimately, the purpose of reviewing performance isn't to produce better reports. It's to make better decisions.
The goal isn't to know everything that's happening in your organization. It's to know whether the things that matter most are getting better, and what you're going to do when they aren't.