Key Indicators and accountability again….the driving force for another great success

I am reading Rudy Giuliani’s book, “Leadership” and have finished a section regarding how he turned his police department around and broke national records for incredible, unprecedented, breakthrough improvement in all then measured categories used to grade police departments around the country. Its a terrific yet simple path to success and has direct application to many of you running small businesses.

First Rudy believes completely in accountability, at all levels for all personnel. He is a firm believer in having goals and objectives with  managers being held accountable for achieving them. He further believes that the way to reach the goals prescribed to is by measuring success by tracking and monitoring the key indicators, then frequent challenges, reviews and evaluations of the progress being made and the problems experienced. Adjustments can then be made when and if necessary. Call if you need help 413-549-2966.

In other words he is a believer in the holy mantra… “track, monitor, control”, the three words I use constantly in regards to requirements for managing a business successfully.

Rudy did a few things to implement his own style of “track, monitor, and control”, he had his police districts, 8 of them, track just about every imaginable and measurable statistic that could be accounted for.

He had tracked  everything from the dozens of types of crimes that could be committed, were they took place, complaints, response time, accidents, gun shots,  you name it, he had it tracked and then had his assistants monitor the tracking taking note of every increase and every decrease in every category.

Once every six weeks he met with his full staff, and the entire management of each police district and grilled them on why some numbers were going up and congratulated them on numbers going down and wanted to now why they were dropping, so others could learn about their successful implementations.

Not only was holding them accountable for both success and failure critical to the overall success of the turnaround, but having everyone involved at the meetings prevented anyone from passing the buck or offering excuses as someone was there who was personally  responsible for the results and needed to answer for the why, the what and the when.

What soon developed was a self monitoring process, followed by everyone involved up and down the entire chain of command, with managers and everyone involved taking responsibility for the improvement of the departments performance, holding themselves accountable for the end results.

As soon as the police executives in each district would see some of their numbers climb they would be all over there men asking why and making changes so when at the meeting with Giuliani they had both improved numbers and good reasons for bad numbers along with a proposed plan to make appropriate changes to improve the numbers.

It worked so well, that the results made the New York City Police department the talk of the country and this program was soon being emulated all over the country by other major police forces in other large cities.

We have talked about the need to manage with information and part of the information being key indicators.

This is a huge success story based on the driving force key indicators and accountability can play if used effectively and should serve as an example to every small business that this is the way to manage successfully.

Do it, what are you waiting for.  Install and implement a key indicator system, track monitor and control the information and reap the benefits.