Measuring Action vs Performance: A Management Fable

 

Once upon a time there were two beekeepers who each had a beehive. The beekeepers worked for a company called Bees Pvt. Ltd. The company’s customers loved its honey and thus demand for it drastically increased. So the company assigned both the beekeepers to increase their honey production of their hives.

The first beekeeper created a bee performance management approach that measured the number of flowers each bee visited. At considerable cost to the beekeeper, an extensive management system was created to count the flowers each bee visited. He also provided feedback to each bee at mid-season on individual performance. He also created awards for the bees who visited the most number of flowers. However, the bees were never told about the hive’s goal to produce more honey so the company could increase honey sales.

The second beekeeper also created a bee performance management approach but this approach communicated to each bee the goal of the hive to increase honey production. The beekeeper and his bees measured two points of their performance: 1) The amount of nectar each bee brought back to the hive & 2) Amount of honey the hive produced. The performance of each bee and hive’s overall performance were charted and posted on the hive’s notice board for all the bees to see. The beekeeper also created few awards for the bees that gathered the most nectar. But he also established a hive incentive program that rewarded each bee in the hive based on the hive’s overall honey production- the more honey produced, the more recognition each bee will get.

At the end of the season, the beekeepers evaluated their approaches. The first beekeeper found that his hive had indeed increased the number of the flowers visited, but the amount of the honey produced by the hive were dropped. The Queen Bee reported that because the bees were so busy trying to visit as many hives as possible, they limited the amount of nectar they would carry so they could fly faster. Also, since only the top performers would be recognized, the bees felt they were competing against each other for awards. As a result, they would not share valuable information with each other that could have helped improve the performance of all the bees. As the beekeeper handed out the awards to individual bees, unhappy buzzing was heard in the background. After all was said and done, one of the high performing bees told the beekeeper that if he had known that the real goal was to make more honey, he would have worked totally differently.

The second beekeeper, however, had very different results. Because each bee in his hive was focused on the hive’s goal of producing more honey, the bees had concentrated their efforts on gathering more nectar in order to produce more honey than before. The bees worked together to determine the highest nectar yielding flowers and to create quicker processes for depositing the nectar they had gathered. They also worked together to help increase the amount of nectar gathered by poorer performers. The Queen Bee of this hive reported that the poor performers either improved their performance or transferred to hive no. 1. Because the hive had reached its goal, the beekeeper rewarded each bee his portion of the hive incentive. The keeper was also surprised to hear a loud, happy buzz and victorious flapping of wings as he rewarded the individual high-performing bees with special recognition.   

 

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