Job Scorecard

One of the exercises I do with my clients, every quarter is a talent assessment, where we go one level down and assess each individual and figure out whether they're A players, B players, C players or toxic C players, and what actions we're going to take based on that.

What I've also started doing is having each leader in front of their team in front of their peers self assess, on a scale of zero to 10.

Are they living the core values on a scale of zero to 10?

How productive they are?

On this last go round, something really interesting happened, I was debriefing with the CEO, who was amazed that one of his folks on his leadership team had scored themselves a nine out of 10 in productivity, whereas he thought they were a six, maybe seven at best in productivity.

So I asked what makes you say that? Why do you think they're a six or seven.

So while I just think he ought to be getting more done in his role, he's not being strategic enough. He's not thinking about big picture company, and started rattling off some kind of fuzzy definitions of productivity.

And then I asked, do you and this person have the same definition of what productivity means?

And we realized what the problem was, what I coach all of my clients to create is something called the job scorecard.

And I stole that term from a methodology called Top Grading, there's a great book you all should read, called "Who the A method for hiring".

But in that methodology, they talk about having a job scorecard, which are things like what's the mission of the role? What are the roles and responsibilities? What are the competencies, but I think most importantly, what are the measurable outcomes of the roll?

That's what most companies, that's what most individuals are missing is a common understanding for a function, for a role.

What are the measurable outcomes of that role.

For head of marketing, I imagine a measurable outcome is not a beautiful website. It's not a really colorful digital marketing campaign. It may be something simple. Like, we need five new marketing qualified leads every week.

For a head of talent or human resources. It's not we need to make sure we do a good job of communicating our benefits program. A measurable outcome might be we've increased our talent density from 20% up to 35%.

How clear are you as a leader with what measurable outcomes you're accountable for? And what measurable outcomes your team is accountable for?

Everyone on your team should have a job scorecard starts with the CEOs job scorecard, and cascades down.

Do you have a job scorecard? If you don't, when are you going to create one?