Month: January 2026

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Discretionary Effort Level

How do you get the best with your employees?

There’s not a single answer to that question. Every team member has their own wants, needs, and goals that inform their actions as to why they show up every day. When team members begin to see the goal of the organization conflicting with their own personal goals you’ll get reduced efforts.

One action I’ve found that helps with this is acknowledgement. Generally if someone knows you know, and knows that you care, and trusts that it’s temporary, then they’ll go a little further than normal. If you don’t do this you’ll stop getting their discretionary effort left. That’s the other thing I tend to keep in mind as a helpful tool that frames my goals for a team member into understandable language.

That is the part of them that only they bring to the organization. How do we gain your discretionary effort level? Something as simple as asking “What do you need from me to offer your discretionary effort level in the tasks you have?” yields drastic and large insights about your staff’s needs.

How do you help your employees with giving more than they thought they could without trading away their own personal wants and desires?

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Goodhart’s Law

I was talking with one of my staff about some service design issues yesterday. The point that was brought up was about how some action around poor service is coming from a need to present numbers and I brought up the concept of GoodHart’s Law.

If you’ve never heard GoodHart’s Law it goes like this “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

This has show to be true many times over. So if you’re dealing with a problem in your culture, service delivery, etc. Look at the incentives you’ve put in place by what your team believes to be the target.

Often i’ve found the better version is to have a less numerically clear ideal state as a target and the metrics inform if your distance to the ideal state.
E.G. “We never want a client to get off the phone and feel like their problem will never be solved. We want them to get off the phone with us and think ‘they have this.'”
Then you add metrics, not as goals, but as informers of the distance between where you are and the ideal future state.

Thoughts? Have you seen this in your own org?

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Measure What Matters

There’s a trope that continues to track as sensical.

“Measure what matters.”

I was talking to someone the other day about a feature in a product and asked about reporting on it. There wasn’t any reporting against the feature yet. e.g. who used it and how it was used. The thing is, if it really was valuable, you’d want to track the results. Are you adding features without a thought about how to communicate the value the feature gives back out? If so, then the reality might be the feature is useless. If it were useful you’d want a feedback loop to understand how.

Adding something custom without a mechanism to report back it’s use tells me it’s busy work.

What do you think? Is this true? Have you ever found anything valuable for which you didn’t have a subsequent reporting mechanism?