The Balanced Scorecard

Motivating employees to deliver your strategy.

You’ll most likely have heard the saying “What you measure is what you get.” This is something that’s true across many areas of management – if you set people targets, and reward them when they meet these targets, they’ll often do all they can to achieve them.

This is great in principle, but can be disastrous in practice: One problem is that it’s much easier to measure financial results than it is to measure progress in other essential areas (such as staff satisfaction). This leads to an over-reliance on financial measurement. A second issue is that people will, quite rightly, drop other activities to meet challenging goals – this is part of why stretch goals are set.

Taken together, this means that organizations often focus their efforts on short term financial results, at the same time that the underpinnings of their business wither away, neglected.

This is where the idea of the “Balanced Business Scorecard” is important – as a tool for improving the performance of a whole organization, a large department or a small team. The Balanced Scorecard or Weighted Scorecard helps you measure and improve performance in an integrated way.