Why "Lead Measures" are the key to everything

”Lead Measures” or “Predictive Activities” as I prefer to call them are the key to sustained high performance in any area of our lives.
They are a small sub-set of our daily behaviour loops and many of them are so simple and instinctive that we don’t give them moments thought. However, when it comes to results, they are disproportionately powerful.

When the pressure comes to “Gain Market Share”, “Increase Donations”, “Cut costs” or “Maximise profits” many of us revert to a state of focussed panic. We are willing to expend energy and we want our enterprise to succeed but the truth is that we often don’t really know where to target that energy for the best outcome.

Discovering the small number of activities and behavioural loops that will actually turn our effort and energy into tangible results takes time and can be very frustrating but once we have discovered them, they will yield results repeatedly and predictably.

Notice that we “discover” them. We don’t “decide” what they are. For any set of results, there already are “predictive Activities” that will generate them. Often they are surprising and they are almost always difficult to identify but the effort to find them will be repaid many times over when you focus on them.

A client, who worked for a roadside recovery service, made the shocking discovery that the single behaviour that distinguished his most effective recovery engineer from the rest of the team, when it came to selling batteries at the side of the road, was that he always asked the customer “Would you like to buy a battery from me?”

It seemed so obvious that the client couldn’t believe such basic behaviour could really explain the difference in results but when other members of the team were encouraged to ask the same question, result improved dramatically.

It turned out that there were many reasons why team members were not asking this key sales question and addressing those issues led to further growth. The big surprise though was that such a simple step could generate such huge growth.