Whereas the private sector can look at profit, growth, market share and wealth to determine whether businesses are successful, it's a lot harder to find agreement in the public sector.
Around any leadership table there may be several ways of measuring success. Using a reputation management model as a starting point, I've developed a matrix to enable a frank discussion and potential agreement about what success could look like at your council (see table).
The starting point, in column one, is to determine each of the areas that matter to you as a team, including everything that matters around the top table. For example, you could include ‘keeping the political leadership happy', ‘avoiding negative headlines', ‘having a balanced budget', ‘keeping stakeholders on board', ‘maximising staff productivity' and so on.
You can have as many headings as you would like. The key is not the number, but how much each matters. So in column two, each heading should be awarded a share of 100 points. The more something matters, the more points it gets. This is about weighting. Given that senior leadership team (SLT) leadership is a collective endeavour, agreement on the proportions is vital.
Importantly, the weighting reflects not only the relative importance but also the cost of each item measured in terms of effort, resource and attention. Crucially, the total weighting must add up to 100.
In column three, you should assign a score out of 10 to each priority area. This reflects your performance against each goal – 10 is top, zero is a problem. But before you score your performance you should first agree what a 10 looks like. In some areas, such as ‘keeping the political leadership happy', if this was a goal, then the score might fluctuate wildly in any given week. Also, you may only have vague meta-indicators of success (no late night calls from the leader on Sunday night, for example).
Scoring can be further complicated by the different relationships that different members of SLT may have with each of the goals. Corporate risk is not always evenly spread across the whole team – ask any director of children's services awaiting the results of a serious case review. Importantly, you will be determining collective success.
In column four, multiply the weighting by the performance score. This will give you a weighted score. Then add all of the weighted scores and divide the total by 100. This will give you a success score out of 10. This can then be tracked and monitored over time. The maximum score is 10.
Making the model robust will depend upon open and frank discussion about all the elements. This works best when at each stage you put as much on the table as possible.
Try to ensure that you look at your performance from the point of view of the people judging you. If ‘keeping the political leadership happy' is a goal, then it will be the cabinet or its most powerful members who will determine whether you are delivering or not. It's easy to delude yourself into believing that you are doing a great job in the absence of any information to the contrary.
It's worth recognising there will be interdependencies – delivery for the leader, for example, may hinge on other success measures. There could be a causal relationship between different success areas – ‘leadership could be happy' when you avoid negative headlines, drive up productivity and balance the budget by cutting staff. Sometimes achievement on one goal undermines success on others.
Finally, be aware that just as the team can look at success through this matrix, so too can individuals. One member of your SLT may, for example, measure their success in terms of their ability to deliver on a large project, build confidence that the key members have in them and secure a higher paid more senior position.
This can become pertinent when an individual's motivations are not fully aligned with those of the whole team. But while it would be helpful to be open about such drivers in public, few would be naïve enough to talk about what really matters to them. Public ambitions are all too easily flaunted.
The Success Matrix is designed to facilitate an open discussion about what really counts and where effort really needs to go to achieve it. And it can make the complex matter of measuring success more visible.
Mark Fletcher-Brown is a former communication consultant
