Defining Relevant Indicators and Questioning Their Usefulness
In an era overflowing with data and analytics, measuring indicators in an organization should ideally drive continuous improvement. However, this is not always the case. The obsession with monitoring indicators often lacks purpose and can be detrimental to an organization’s performance.
The Role of Leadership and Organizational Culture
To successfully turn data into true drivers of sustainable results, leadership must be willing to change behaviors and organizational culture. This shift requires updating ingrained ways of thinking, stepping out of comfort zones, and adopting new practices.
The first step is to define what should be measured, a task often neglected due to the inertia of maintaining outdated and potentially harmful indicators.
Relevance of Indicators
If indicators are not relevant, their tracking loses value, and the time spent on it becomes a distraction for leaders and teams. Regularly reviewing and updating indicators is not an idle task but a crucial condition for successful, timely corrections.
Context and Impact
This issue becomes especially relevant as more than half of companies plan to transform their products and distribution channels to remain competitive and address new markets, according to KPMG Mexico’s study “Panorama de la innovación en México y Centroamérica 2025”.
Leadership and Diversity as Catalysts for Change
Questioning and renewing indicators is key to identifying what needs changing, which involves updating deeply ingrained thought patterns and adopting new practices. This challenge is not technical but human.
Diversity plays a crucial role in this context. New perspectives (based on gender, age, or other characteristics) can bring valuable ideas to the table. Even generative artificial intelligence (IAGen) has the potential to act as an additional team member, accelerating idea generation and evaluation under human analysis.
Leadership’s Role in Transformation
Behavioral change management is vital in talent management, starting with leadership. Often, leaders become the first obstacle to change due to resistance.
Inconsistency demotivates: when those in charge do not practice what they preach, credibility is lost. Therefore, active change sponsorship is essential to transform organizational culture.
It’s particularly valuable for leaders to function as sponsors promoting the inclusion of diverse voices and enabling spaces for analyzing initiatives addressing the root causes of challenges faced by the organization.
Lack of a culture that fosters innovation (44%) and insufficient alignment between departments (40%) are among the main barriers to innovation, according to the aforementioned study.
Genuine Commitment and Diverse Minds
Without identifying and transforming these barriers into catalysts for change, no metric or tracking routine will suffice to improve an organization’s financial, operational, or any other kind of results.
Data availability and automated reporting are insufficient without genuine leadership commitment and a culture capable of challenging the status quo to address the root causes of undesired outcomes.
Are diverse minds and voices being summoned to update and monitor business indicators in your organization? Is leadership willing to step out of its comfort zone for innovation? How is this renewal being driven from the Board of Directors?
