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“If we did all the things we were capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

Thomas Edison

Critical success factors are the measures that determine whether or not your organization is successful in achieving its goals. They provide macro containers for organizing and evaluating the outcomes and impacts of your efforts. Through the use of the balanced scorecard, management can distill those key factors that have to be achieved for an organization to be able to realize successful outcomes.

The balanced scorecard, a management system developed by Harvard University’s Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. It provides feedback around both the internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. I am a huge fan of the balanced scorecard because it focuses efforts on strategy and vision while offering a set of unmistakable measures that give organizations a quick, but comprehensive, view of what is going on.

The scorecard is organized into four key perspectives: financial perspective, or how to we look to our shareholders, constituents, or funders; internal business perspective, or how we have maintained excellence in our business processes and procedures; customer perspective, or how our customers see us; and innovation and learning perspective, or how we can continue to improve and create value for all our stakeholders. Each point of view can be further interpreted as those specific factors that make sense for an individual organization.

For example, if you specifically identified financial growth and sustainability as a key perspective, one of your critical success factors might be profitability. Your measurement of this might be changes in top-line revenue with respect to the bottom line; analyzing pricing formulas; and whether you are in the red or the black on your financial statements at the end of the year. With quality systems in place – a critical success factor for operational excellence – you would also be able to measure, analyze and project a financial return on investment while tracking smart sustainable growth.

Once you know what your critical success factors are, you can then identify possible measures of your goals and results. Continuing to distill the process, you would then be able to list specific objectives and actions to achieve them. The example I’ve included might be your own organization’s scorecard.

From here your scorecard can be further expanded. Based upon the company scorecard, each business unit would then create its own targets and measures; and from those unit scorecards, individual staff success factors and scorecards would then filter down. This last step is an undeniable way to show how everyone’s individual actions support the whole in very real and connected ways.

The individual’s scorecard rolls up to the corporate scorecard; the corporate scorecard rolls down to the individual. You can now answer questions about how you (individually or corporately) are doing and you can see how any one action contributes to the whole.

The bottom line: if the organization is doing well, the individual, such as an employee or customer, is doing well; and if the individual is doing well, the organization is doing well, too.

How well are you performing up and down your organization? How do you know?