Assessments - do you know where you are?

I was reading part of an Andy McNab book about his selection for the British SAS and the portion of land navigation where they were told where to go and took off running to get there.  When they thought they were close they had to take out a topographic map and point with a bade of grass or a small stick where they thought they were on the map and the instructor would confirm or deny their assessed location.  If correct they were given a new waypoint and if not the instructor would tell them to correctly identify their location and then move on.  Long way to get to the simple point that you need to where you organizationally and where you want to go.  It's important that your staff understands what's important from a management perspective and what that means to their organization.

So how do you do this?  Sadly there's not one method that works for all occasions.  You might be able to get away with simply setting goals like, "Increase sales every quarter by 5%" and then following a trend line from one quarter to the next.  Or you might be able to simply chart the number of page views of your site on a daily basis and that is diagnostic enough for your needs.  Or you might need to go to a different extreme and establish what objectives you want to achieve, what effects you need to meet those objectives and what tasks are required to meet those effects.  This last methodology is more of a military way to approach this along with the associate measures of performance and measures of effectiveness which look at task accomplishment and are we doing the right things.

It really boils down to organizational navigation through your business.  You need to know where you are beyond what your gut tells you.  I do concede that a gut feeling is useful but one can start to believe their own assessment and ultimately have a situation go bad on them if you don't consult another source to see where you are.  This is not an easy thing to do sometimes, especially in today's GPS, smart phone world in which you can click a button and see how many people have viewed your profile, like your Facebook status, etc...Assessments are difficult but are absolutely fundamental to learning from your mistakes, and charting a successful way forward.   Invest the time to figure out what's important to you and your organization and ensure your staffs know what these measures are and what they are responsible for in this arena.  An informed staff who knows what they are graded on will, in the long run, be a better performing team that one that does not know the organizational measures of success.