Who Are the Animals of Analytics-Based Performance Management?

Ever notice how the personalities and dispositions of animals often resemble humans’? An organization’s pursuit of adopting analytics-based performance management involves personalities of all types. How are they like the creatures that populate our planet?

I recently posted my monthly column on this topic with the same title, Who Are the Animals of Analytics-Based Performance Management? The article is a zoology of analogous types of employees that you might recognize. Here are the first two:

• Lions – These are the managers whom co-workers respect. They are bold and lead their pride. With analytics-based performance management, their boldness enables them to have the will to try emerging managerial concepts. These include strategy maps and their companion, the balanced scorecard; activity-based costing to measure product and customer profitability; and driver-based budgeting with rolling financial forecast updates. In the wild, males seldom live long due to injuries sustained from continuous fighting with rivals. In business, lion-like managers will encounter conflicts in their pursuit and support of these managerial concepts.

• Peacocks – These are those employees who like to look good to everyone. Peacocks cannot fly; this type of employee’s contribution to implementing analytics-based performance management is limited. They like to take credit and display their plumage, but they have not earned the credit they presume to claim.

Access the entire article in the hypertext link above to read about these other types of employees:

• Owls
• Rabbits
• Tortoises
• Skunks
• Armadillos
• Crocodiles
• Horses
• Ostriches
• Snakes
• Beavers
• Eagles
• Lemmings
• Sheep
• Elephants

The article concludes with this. So, what animal-like types of employees do you work with? Probably all of the types above. The promise for the continued adoption of business analytics embedded in performance management methodologies is that animals have prospered for thousands of centuries. They survive because there is some balance to how they coexist.

The same prosperity will apply to the increasing adoption rate of analytics-based performance management methodologies and the software systems that support the methodologies. Hundreds of types of animals coexist in the wild (mankind willing). Their generations continue. Organizations that maintain balanced and rational thinking will continuously learn and improve the same way that animal offspring learn from their elders.