Measured Against What?

It’s hard to measure results when we don’t know what we are measuring.

One thing that, every time I hear it, never fails to surprise me.

"I don't know how I'm really being measured."

Sometimes it's phrased differently. “I'm not sure what is really most important." Or, "Every time I feel like I'm on top of it, the goalposts move." Different words. Same underlying problem.

The bigger surprise: I rarely hear this from the frontline. I hear it from executives and senior leaders more often than from anyone below them.

I saw this play out recently with a VP who plainly stated.

“I know how to do my job. My team respects me. Our clients are happy.”

Then they paused.

“But I honestly don’t know how I am actually being measured in my role.”

This wasn’t someone struggling. This wasn’t a new manager finding their footing or someone fresh out of school still learning the ropes. This was someone succeeding by every visible measure who still couldn’t tell me what success actually meant in their role.

We assume the closer someone gets to the top of an organization, the clearer the priorities should become. Yet I often find the opposite. The higher someone sits, the more likely they are to inherit expectations from multiple directions, without anyone merging them into a single definition of success.

We talk about accountability like it’s something you build in one person. Hold them to the standard. Give them clear feedback. Expect follow-through. All of that matters, and none of it works if the standard itself was never agreed upon by the very people responsible for setting it.

Accountability assumes alignment above the person being held accountable. It assumes that if you asked two executives what success looks like for a particular role, they would describe the same destination. Too often they don't. Not because anyone is intentionally working against each other, but because nobody stopped to test whether they were actually aiming at the same target.

This is why “hold people accountable" often becomes shorthand for holding someone accountable to whichever version of success the loudest voice in the room is using at that moment. The employee isn't failing to hit the mark. The mark shifts depending on who's defining it. And no one upstream notices because they haven't reconciled their expectations against anyone else's.

Organizations spend enormous energy measuring performance. We audit results, review goals, and refine scorecards. What we rarely examine is whether the people responsible for setting expectations actually agree on what those expectations are.

If you want to test this in your own organization, it’s a five-minute exercise, not a six-month initiative. Pick a role. Ask two or three people above it, separately, what success looks like for the person in that role. Put the answers side by side.

If they match, you’ve confirmed a level of alignment most organizations only assume they have. If they don’t, you’ve likely found the real reason someone on your team feels like they’re chasing a moving target.

The people closest to the confusion are often the first to be blamed, while the people who created it rarely realize they did.