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You can’t lead a team with a spreadsheet.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
— often misattributed to Peter Drucker
Managers love their metrics.
They are forever trying to quantify their business, their teams, their work. Their goals are noble! They want to unambiguously get everyone from the CEO down to the Janitor to have the same information. They want to provide quick and clear feedback on how well people are doing. They want to remove manager bias from performance evaluation. At every company you’ll ever work for, there will be some manager striving toward the platonic ideal of a singular number that signifies just how good a worker is at their job.
The modern take on this are KPIs. Instead of measuring all the things, the new dogma is that you should only focus on the “key” performance indicators. Advocates like this, because if KPIs fail people then it must be someone else’s fault for not picking the right indicators. Managers like this, because tracking a few metrics is way less work than tracking a bunch of them.
If you’re in software engineering, then the DORA metrics are currently in vogue. Google did a bunch of research and found 4 (now 5) metrics that correlate well with their teams’ performance. People, doing what people have done since the dawn of time, promptly fell into the logic trap…
