Cascading Scorecards to Drive Organizational Alignment
To produce extraordinary business results, even the most brilliant strategies require that everyone in the organization understands the strategy and his or her role in its achievement. Translating a strategic plan into a top-level scorecard with performance metrics is a great start, but to really drive alignment and see performance improve, the top-level scorecard and metrics must be “cascaded” down and across the entire organization. This entails developing department- and area-specific scorecards that are linked to the top-level scorecard, but reflect the processes, work systems, and customer requirements that relate to the specific department or area.
Through the process of Cascading Scorecards, you identify and map out the cause-and-effect relationships that exist between lower and higher level outcomes (also called lagging and leading measures), ultimately linking every employee’s goals and performance with the top-level organizational strategy.
A framework like this, with linked objectives, measures, and aligned improvement initiatives, provides incredible insight into and control over organizational performance by making it possible – even in very large organizations — to spot and react to a budding problem before it adversely affects high-level outcomes.
To be successful, you’ll need a deep understanding of linked objectives, leading and lagging measures, and processes for creating strategic alignment. If this is a new process for you or if you think your cascaded scorecards could be improved, ActiveStrategy can help with scorecard cascading workshops.