Collaboration – Communicate the facts to employees and customers, and ask for ideas and help.  Companies reported that employees came up with a number of really useful ideas to reduce costs.  Being able to do this underscores the critical importance of building a high-trust communications environment in your organization – so that people are willing to share their ideas, and care about your success.

Transparency – These successful entrepreneurs identified the key metrics that focused everyone on performance, and began reporting on them even more frequently.  To quote the article:  “One company described the increase in their business as ‘reporting that was done yearly was now monthly, monthly reporting was now weekly, weekly reporting was daily, and daily reporting was many times each day.’”

Creating a system for sharing performance measures may seem counter-intuitive during a recession, but the process has immediate payoffs.  In my experience, the act of getting your team into a room and talking about what the key measures ARE is a high value exercise in itself.  Once you’ve arrived at a set of key performance indicators and created a system for regular reporting (whether with a simple spreadsheet or a specialized performance management software package)  you are able to adapt and act, as a team, in a much more dynamic way.

1. Figuring out what’s going on and what’s possible to do. Do we agree on what the situation is?  Do we see a common problem or opportunity? Do we both care to do something about it?
2. Coming to an agreement. Healthy agreements and promises are based on each party clearly understanding what the other person is offering or asking for, and what that will look like when it’s done.  In business planning language, this is expressed as SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
3. Following through, and dealing with breakdowns. This is where things get challenging. If our agreement is clear, whether because it’s very thorough, or because we “understand” each other through past experience,  follow through may be easy and straightforward. If not, we need to get comfortable with addressing the situation early on – a skill I call constructive complaining. The clearer the agreement in the first place, the easier it is to deal with breakdowns.
4. Declaring completion, letting go, and learning. This could be as simple as saying Thank You for a job well done, or a lot tougher if things haven’t turned out the way we wanted or expected. Letting go does not mean forgetting about it, it’s understanding how to get better results next time, and becoming more skillful with our requests and offers to others.

Too often though, we fall into the trap of seeing businesses, or any purposeful organization, as a “machine” – a financial machine, an information machine, etc, as if we simply plan it, program it, and “get” the parts to co-operate.  A more powerful approach is to see the plan as an agreement among all the people that need to make it happen. To be successful in today’s transparent environment, any organization, whether a business, a government agency, or a social enterprise, needs to maintain the confidence of all its stakeholders.  This requires an ongoing conversation about what each stakeholder values and how well we are fulfilling that.  And that’s the foundation for measuring business performance.