No doubt you pay attention to a range of numbers in your organisation. With frequent and detailed reporting, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in the end one key number is important.

That number might be profit per transaction, or profit per employee. However, as an end product it’s of more use to the head of your business unit than it is to frontline leaders.

From a  leadership perspective, you’ll find that a focus on one seemingly less important result can have the flow-on effect of dramatically improving the important numbers.

For example, one of our performance improvement projects was to increase sales in a retail bank inbound customer service centre. The Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) had the opportunity to identify other bank products that would be of benefit to the customers with whom they were talking. But it could take up to 13 weeks for a sale to close. The sales were generally closed by people in the retail branches, even though the initial lead was generated by the contact centre.

In this case, the CSRs in the contact centre did not have control over the closing of the sale. What they did have control over was obtaining qualified leads. So, while the success of the project for senior managers was based on sales improvement, the key result that the Team Leaders and CSRs were focused on was ‘Leads per FTE’ (full-time equivalents).

But we all know that simply telling people what numbers they’ll be measured by, and what they need to do to achieve those numbers, doesn’t mean that the majority of people will perform. The reason this occurs is that we don’t pay enough attention to three hidden numbers that make or break the performance of frontline teams.

The first hidden number is this: up to 70% of employee motivation and performance is driven by an employee’s immediate manager. Since the majority of people in organisations report to a first-level manager  manager, organisational productivity is determined by the manner in which these managers choose to lead their people. If this number were truly understood, the training, guidance and support provided to managers would be significantly higher than what it is in most organisations.

The second hidden number is this: 80% of employee motivation and performance is driven by 20% of  leadership activity. You’ll know this concept as the Pareto Principle. Having had the opportunity to work with, and observe, a wide variety of high-performing managers over the past 15 years, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the Pareto Principle applies equally to the activities of  leaders as it does to anything else.

Yet the emphasis in the majority of   leadership  training is either equally weighted across activities, or it’s weighted towards areas that don’t make a significant difference. If this 80/20 number were truly understood, organisations would pay much more attention to determining and expecting the 20% of the  leadership activity that drives 80% of employee motivation and performance.

The third and final hidden number is this: 87% of skills and knowledge trained are lost within one month. This is equally true for skills trained for, as it is for anything else. So while training is important, it is insufficient to enable managers to grow high-performing teams. If this number were truly understood, organisations would pay much more attention to measuring and supporting the application of  leadership skills.

To make a real impact on the numbers that are important to your organisation, paying attention to the hidden numbers that significantly influence employee motivation and performance can make all the difference.

Image by Klaus Post