Many of you will be familiar with “The Balanced Scorecard” as a means of measuring and improving the performance of a business by looking at four key areas, and not solely at the financial aspects. I’ll not go into it here, but I would certainly recommend you look into it for your own business.
So why do I introduce it here?
Well; during a discussion last week with someone who felt they weren’t doing as well as they could (but couldn’t put a finger on why), I suggested building up a Personal Scorecard, something similar to The Balanced Scorecard, but based solely on your own personal performance, in your professional / career / business role.
Often we get to the end of a week, and our judgement of our week’s productivity is clouded, because we aren’t measuring accurately, and to some extent we need to find more objectivity.
So when you look at your week, do you do so against a consistent scorecard?
What are you scoring yourself on?
Are these the right things to be scoring yourself on?
What other factors need to be included? And how will you measure these?
What performance standards do you have in place to measure?
How do you take those measurements?
What are the lessons you are learning from the measurements you have taken so far?
Where can you make significant improvements?
Is your scorecard simple enough to monitor easily?
The Balanced Scorecard system looks at each factor and then breaks each into Objectives, Measures, Targets and Initiatives. This is a great way to judge a Business’ performance, and will work equally well with the Personal Scorecard.
Including this as part of a regular Friday afternoon “Self-Coaching Session” may be more revealing than you think.