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3 Elements Of A Great Scoreboard For Team Productivity

February 25, 2019
John Rutkiewicz - Guest Blogger

Brian Tracy, famed self-development author and speaker, once wrote: “Time management is really life management, personal management.”

Productivity ultimately relies on you and me; what you do, what I do. Time management is an element of self-leadership.

In organizational life, however, it’s also about the team. When you have projects and initiatives that you’re responsible for, most of the time, you’re responsible for some parts, and others are responsible for other parts. Right?

And so, it’s not just what you and I each do as individuals – it’s what the team does as well. How it interacts, how it works together, how it tracks its progress.

That’s where a scoreboard comes in.

Keep a Scoreboard for the Team

In sports – football, basketball, soccer, baseball, tennis – why do we keep a scoreboard?

scoreboard

First answer: to keep score.

Better answer: so we know whether we’re winning!

People want to win. It’s energizing. It’s motivating. There’s a difference in energy and focus when we’re playing a game for fun and when we’re really keeping score.

A scoreboard also helps us – as individual players AND as a team – adjust to the game as its being played. We MUST know the score, otherwise, we don’t know what to do, how to shift, where to focus…so we can ensure our chances of winning.

Here are three things to keep in mind as you think about developing scoreboards for yourself and with your team.

Three Points to Developing Scoreboards for Yourself and Your Team

1. A Great Scoreboard is Simple

"Simple" means we can look at it in a moment and know the score.

Too many scoreboards in business are too complex to process easily. They’re buried away in spreadsheets and reports that require an advanced degree in analytics just to understand them. Keep it simple.

“Simple” is also a relative term. As Einstein said, “Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

You and your team need to determine what kind of scoreboard best conveys the progress of your  projects and initiatives, while also being mindful of not making it so complex that it prevents you from knowing the score.

Below is a simple chart a client of mine uses.

Scoreboard_completionThey’re a supplier to local home builders. One of their key measures is to ship at least 85% of their jobs to home sites complete – one trip. Industry average in their market is about 75% -- they want to stand out as a delivery leader. Plus, the more they ship jobs complete, the more they cut costs (because they don’t have multiple deliveries per site) and they increase efficiency within their operation (because multiple deliveries eat into production time).

At a glance, their simple scoreboard shows their weekly progress to the metric, as well as (via the trend line) the longer-term view of weather they’re winning.

2. A Great Scoreboard Operates in “Real Time”

"Real time" means two things: It’s updated regularly to show real-time results, and it’s publicly available so team members can view it in real time.

“Real time” might mean your scoreboard is updated weekly at the very least, especially for longer-term projects and initiatives. But the more frequently you’re able to update the scoreboard and keep it in view for everyone to see, the more easily everyone can know the score.

At my building supply client, this scoreboard is posted at all times for the production team to see. It’s posted on a big board at the door where they enter and exit the shop. And the current week’s results are updated each morning to incorporate the delivery percentage from the day before and to show the team its weekly progress from the previous day.

That not only lets them know whether they’re winning – it creates awareness for them about what they need to be doing differently TODAY, and even for the rest of the week, to influence the numbers in the right direction.

Another crucial advantage of a real-time scoreboard is that it focuses us on the LEADING INDICATORS that will bring us our desired results. Many times in business we focus on lagging indicators – the final measureables, the final scores. “Did we hit our number?”

But if we only focus on lagging indicators – rather than the inputs and the actions that move us toward it – by the time we get the data, the number, it’s too late. That’s like waiting to put up the score in a football game or soccer match only once the game is over.

Or it’s like me saying, “I’m going to lose 20 pounds in the next three months, but I’m going to weigh myself only once – at the end of three months. Boy, I hope I lose those 20 pounds.”

3. A Great Scoreboard Is for the Players

A scoreboard isn’t there so much for the coaches, the leaders. It’s there for the team, the players. That’s why it needs to be simple, publicly available, and updated regularly.

So, the scoreboard is FOR the team. It’s also best if the scoreboard is created BY the team. Ask them: What kind of scoreboard will be useful for us to track progress, so we can always know the score and adjuist along the way?

There are hundreds of ways to create and present a scoreboard. It could be something like this…

Scorboard_ProjectProgressIt could be a burndown chart, as used in AGILE project management…

Scoreboard_BurnChart

Or it could be a comparison chart like this one.

Scoreboard_ComparisonChart

There are hundreds of ways you can do scoreboards. GOOGLE is a great place to get you and your team going.

Get your team together...isolate what the team needs to measure and track...then build your scoreboard together and start keeping score.

If you do it, you’ll enhance your team’s focus on what’s most important, and you’ll increase their winning ways.


For more of my articles on #productivity, check out Think 20% and Time Blocking.

If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to follow me on LinkedIn and to share this post with others in your network. Or visit me at www.livingasaleader.com.

Lemberg Guest Blogger. John has more than 30 years of experience as a leader and manager in fields ranging from sales and marketing to customer service, financial services and human resources. Since 1993, he has provided facilitation, training, coaching and leadership-development support to hundreds of leaders, from front-line supervisors to C-suite executives. John is a facilitator and certified coach for Living As A Leader in Brookfield, WI.
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