Coaching Through Counting: What You Count Matters 2

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”

– Einstein

I often coach my business clients about implementing key metrics and measures of their key indicators. It has been my experience that you get what you measure, this week I was reminded to look at this a little differently.

A friend sent me an e-mail with a portion of a TED talk, “Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile” by Chip Conley. I love and refer to his book, “Peak, How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow” a lot so I found the video and watched it. I highly recommend taking the 17 minutes to watch the video, but in case you don’t click on the link, I’ve summarized a few key points.

He tells the story of an immigrant maid who works in one of his hotels who taught him about counting her connections with other employees and positive emotional connections with customers. She had a lot of joy in her (seemingly meaningless) job based on these intangible items.

Chip Conley did some research on business leaders and found “that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty. And yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business…. “

Inspired and happy employees equal sizable profits! These are not mutually exclusive. Finding a way to measure the intangible items by asking powerful questions is good for business.

He introduces the King of Bhutan, a small country between China and India, who started measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness) instead of GDP. Forty other countries have since started using this measure. The King has taken the country into democracy with no conflicts or violence (especially interesting with the current events in Egypt). The King explained that he and the government leaders do not create happiness but they do create the conditions for happiness to occur. They have multiple measures and key indicators that they are tracking for these conditions.

One of the things that I’ve recently learned to count is the number of acts of kindness I perform. I learned this through the mPWR10 coaching tool that I became certified to deliver. This measure is based on research from positive psychology and has been proven to increase happiness. Remember happy people and sizable profits are not mutually exclusive!

What can you start measuring or counting today that is meaningful in your work or in your personal life?

photo credit: Bashed via Flickr creative commons