Fear. Anxiety. Stress. Anger. Not exactly the emotions we’re hoping to invoke in our employees, right? Not exactly the key to motivational management, anyway.

Unfortunately, those are the emotions many people feel when it’s time to discuss their work metrics. Employees dread the idea of their manager reducing them to a number. A number that might be accurate and important but doesn’t accurately reflect all they bring to their job.

And no matter the niceties of how it’s all delivered, people get defensive and deflated. Why?

“The very act of measuring communicates distrust, power, control, and dehumanization.” That’s what one fellow student said when the topic of performance measurement came up in my Ph.D. class.

He was right, and he was wrong

He was right because measurement can be dehumanizing. Managers, intentionally or not, end up using measurements negatively in an attempt to motivate people. But it doesn’t work. Instead, it makes them fearful, stressed, anxious, and mad; it makes them feel like they’re never good enough.

He was wrong because measurement itself does not mandate those effects. And employees want measurement.

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