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1. Identify target audiences. How can we select KPIs that are meaningful to others if we know nothingabout their identities? It is especially important to find teams and individuals across the organizationwho have the ability to directly impact the health of the business. These are usually not the leadersand strategists, but delivery folks executing on and managing the front lines. To gain initialmomentum, it can be helpful to first identify specific individuals and then extrapolate cross-functionalaudience types from this list.

2. Ethnography. Take a holistic approach to studying your people - observing them in their work environment to better appreciate their needs, motivations, goals, desires, constraints and obstacles.Use research methods such as participant observation and contextual inquiry to gain these insights. If these methods are not feasible, interviews and questionnaires can suffice. Focus your research onanswering questions like: Are they driven by financial, intellectual and/or emotional goals? Are theymotivated by fear? This information can then be used to establish tangible personas that synthesizethese attributes. Personas can serve as powerful communication tools and grounding mechanisms thataid critical business decisions like selecting KPIs.

3. Identify business rhythms. People and businesses have their schedules and routines. Once keyindividuals and teams have been identified, determine the patterns and frequency of their activities.The SMART criteria tell us that good KPIs are also timebound, so select metrics that align with these

business rhythms.

4. Perform affinity diagramming. An important part of selecting KPIs is understanding where individualgoals and activities are not aligned with corporate goals and strategy. The prework necessary for thissort of gap analysis exercise can be accomplished through affinity diagramming. Affinitydiagramming (also known as the KJ method) is an effective technique for efficiently making sense of large quantities of qualitative data and unstructured content and is even more effective when executedas a team. Affinity diagramming for both scenarios is critical to the next strategy, gap analysis. (Seesidebar.)

5. Conduct gap analysis. To move forward, it is crucial that we understand the current state.Misalignment between company and personal goals can impact effective KPI selection. Use a gapanalysis to uncover any misalignments. Another organization technique, mental modeling, buildsupon the affinity diagramming strategy and clearly identifies gaps to a visual representation of itsinputs. (See sidebar.) The mental model clearly illustrates when the individual is focused and/or motivated to affect tasks/metrics that are not consistent with corporate strategy and vice versa.Knowing this information is extremely advantageous, as it gives your organization a blueprint of areas to address from a business process/organization standpoint or to consider and target whenselecting KPIs.

6. Consider the domain of control. Select KPIs that fall within the actionable domain of key personnel.For example, a large retail client once described a series of periodic reports that were packed with

pages of metrics to which the store managers were held accountable. They were affectionately labeled"worry reports" because the reports contained too many metrics that the managers had no ability toinfluence. This is where knowledge of the work-life details for such individuals is crucial for selecting the right KPIs. KPIs should be easy to calculate, clearly defined and focused in purpose.Also, they should tell a very rich story in that they take into consideration a comparable entity (versus

budget, forecast, last year, variance to average, etc.). Selecting KPIs using this criteria increasesclarity, focus, determination and motivation in the individual.

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7. Compensation alignment. This is the ultimate strategy to make KPIs relevant for an individual and issimple but effective. Identify metrics that are tied to the compensation (bonus or base) for anindividual. If those metrics are not aligned with corporate goals or strategy, assess and adjust thecompensation model as necessary. Ultimately, it can be very difficult to consistently motivateindividuals to work to improve KPIs when they are not rewarded for doing so. Without such areward, any benefit from improved KPIs will be perceived as indirect in the eyes of the individual.

Once you've done all the work to select and establish relevant KPIs, follow up with the involved parties.Executing these strategies has the beneficial side effect of a personal relationship. Seeking out someone's

perspective does wonders for initiative adoption programs, especially at the delivery levels of theorganization. Take advantage of that momentum and follow up with these individuals on a recurring basisto continue to fortify those relationships and strengthen the purpose behind establishing KPIs in the first

place.

Take First PrizeEngage. Understand. Empathize. Show compassion. Achieve corporate and individual alignment byselecting KPIs that are personally relevant. The next time you begin selecting KPIs, remember to spellKPI next time with a capital R. You may not win any spelling bees, but you will be better positioned toeffectively monitor and improve business performance.

Sidebar:Diagramming and Modeling

To create an affinity diagram, just write any extracted insights about personas (focus on individualmotivations, goals and activities) on sticky notes. Then, group similar sticky notes together into a number of physical groups/piles. Next, create groups of groups, if possible. Finally, label the groups (both theoriginal groups and the new super groups) with meaningful one-to-three word phrases. Capture thisinformation electronically, preferably arranged in a spreadsheet file. Place the super group labels acrossthe top of the spreadsheet in the first row. Place the group labels in separate columns in the second rowunder the super group headings. Transfer the words from the sticky notes to cells under the coordinating

group label. Repeat this exercise, but instead create sticky notes that describe the corporate goals, strategyand initiatives. Also, reuse the same group and super-group labels that were just created instead of creating new labels.

To build the mental model, merge the results of the two affinity diagramming scenarios (individual versuscorporate) in your spreadsheet by copying and pasting the results of the corporate-focused scenario belowthe results of the individual-focused scenario. Since the labels were reused for the second scenario, thedata should align. Now, although the data points align, the values visually indicate where the individualand the company deviate, because each group for each scenario creates a virtual tower of varying height.Analyze the results of the illustration by simply identifying where the tower sizes are relatively andsignificantly unequal.