Balanced Scorecard Designer

When trying to define the qualities of the excellent manager, a term entrepreneurial comes to mind. Someone who can see trends, is aware of market dynamics, as well as dynamics within the organization. As a true entrepreneur, not only been keenly aware of the realities, but being able to envision things that are not yet. A visionary who sees opportunities and is able to impart these visions to others. The ability to dream, to envision, to imagine opportunities is no less crucial than anything else. After all, if a manager cannot dream, how can the come up with something truly new and unique.

For all the awareness and vision, an ideal manager is an actor, a doer, somebody who does not get stuck analyzing trends or dreaming up new markets, rather someone who quickly plans and rapidly executes activities in such a rapid succession that people are unable to comprehend how things can be done so quickly.

Finally, no manager can be truly excellent without the comradeship of his staff, without being keenly aware of their feelings and emotions, without being able to empathize with and support his co-laborers.  Communicating effectively, workload balancing and such are only possible when the manager is aware of both mental logic and emotional state necessary to successfully engage their team.

So, to summarize the foundations of good management are based on four variables that are listed in no particular order: 1) awareness; 2)task management/ability to execute; 3) cohesiveness of the team; and 4) ability to dream/use imagination.

If you think of these four variables, they are also the four ways in which we perceive the world and think. To borrow the language of Myers-Briggs and Jung these are 1) Sensing; 2)Thinking; 3)Feeling; and 4)Intuition. And while the whole old theory about the brain is questionable, these same four elements are often referred to as 1) Left Front; 2)Left Back; 3)Right Front; and 4)Right Back. To use our everyday language these four ways of thinking are 1) Thinking with our senses, eyes, hands; 2)Thinking with our mind, using logic; 3)Thinking with our heart; and 4)Thinking with our gut.

Awareness of these four ways to think is ancient, and yet the application of the awareness that all four must be developed and trained to work in a cohesive union has not been systematically applied to the development of leaders in the fields of management and business.

Conventional wisdom is that we typically have only one of these thinking approaches well developed, may be two, but rarely all four. I submit to you that it is true, but it does happen. Perhaps, what is more important then classifying and pigeon holing everyone to a specific mental process, it is more valuable to help us all develop our brain in such a way that we get better in all four approaches to thinking. Rather than seeing people as a particular personality type, let’s work together to insure that we all have a wonderful personality that is flexible enough to be the type that is necessary under the circumstances and tolerant enough to accept and appreciate people who deal with things differently than we do.

There are two ways to build teams that are much stronger than the sum of their parts. One is through a relationship of people who while personally lean toward one or two of these mindsets but can recognize and value others, who think in a way that is different from theirs and who grow in their specialization on the team. Another is in a team that is constantly cross training and consists of people who can perform all other functions on the team as well. These two are not mutually exclusive. But rather they both point to growth. Growth of each team member in their field, as well as growth in their ability to help out in the fields that are the specialty of their teammates. As well as growth in the closeness and effectiveness of the interconnectedness of the team that so greatly reduces the transaction costs of doing business.

This brings us to the actual measurement of the management team’s growth and business development. We can take a more combinatorial approach. By first measuring the change in in each manager’s skill in each of the four thought approaches and then combining those numbers as a total team score, while keeping in mind the team cohesiveness variable. This may be more precise and may even allow us to compare individual managers against other managers, across business units, thus assuring that we deploy our best talent on our most important projects, but it has two, in my mind, fatal flaws. It is great in theory, but the amount of measurement and calibration involved to assure this measurement may well be prohibitive for most organizations. Perhaps even more importantly, even if we can get past the difficulty of measuring the metrics precisely enough to avoid type one and type two errors that are so demoralizing to  the individual and the team, we still have a motivational problem.  The problem that emerges in the environment of individual measurement an internally competitive environment  that discourages cooperation is bred.  This environment vastly increases the transaction costs, lowering the cohesiveness of the team and defeating the whole value of the measurement.  This  introduces the death spiral of reduced organizational performance that is paralleled by the inevitable inflation of the individual ratings and of the egos. The whole fiasco resulting in the rejection of the measurement tool altogether, in light of better performance by the organizations who do not employ it.

Thus, I propose a different measurement route, one that is at the heart of a growth and development activity that all organizations should embrace anyways and that is collaborative gaming where monthly, or weekly a team is challenged to perform a task together that involves sensing awareness of the five senses and intuitive sixth sense of the gut, logic of the thinking brain and sensibility of the feeling heart. By performing this activity regularly, a change in the performance can easily be tracked and thus provide a crucial indicator of the quality of the management team, while acting as a tool for the improvement along this, most essential,  KPI.

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Oleg Tumarkin is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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