Link your Performance Measures to your Goals

  Most people have heard that you get what you measure. When establishing your performance measures you need to make sure that you are actually measuring something that relates to what you are trying to get. This sounds simple and straight forward but can sometimes be hard to do. If you are measuring number of units sold to evaluate your sales people and at the same time not considering the sales dollars you may encourage behavior that you didn't really want (i.e. deep discounts that increase the number of units sold but reduce your profitability).

  To help ensure that you are getting the behavior and results you want it helps to define your measures of performance in terms of the goals that are being set by the business and/or organizational units.