Creating a Personal Balanced Scorecard

A Personal Scorecard Creates Focus

We all procrastinate. One of the best ways to get past this is to organise yourself, discover your purpose and develop clear strategies to balance your life.

One of the tools that could be useful is a personal balanced scorecard.

Creating a Personal Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard is a method of strategy development pioneered by well-known management gurus, Kaplan and Norton in the early 90s.

The balance scorecard serves as a mechanism to balance the performance of the organisation and it has become a very familiar and important concept in business today.

It is essentially a technique for linking strategies with a balanced set of measures. These measures are then used to inform business processes and major aspects of a business´s development. The key to making good balanced scorecards is to understand the link between different performance measures so that the impact of any one of them can be understood in the context of the whole organisation.

In essence, this is hardly any different from traditional Management by Objectives (MBO), except that MBO seldom emphasises the need for balance and interaction of measures. There is always a hidden assumption in MBO; namely, that organisations already have balanced and relevant measures.

The overarching message is that no business can function without balance – this is the general consensus. The same can be said of individual human beings.

The dimensions that the standard Balanced Scorecard incorporates include the following:

The customer relationship dimension – how do our customers see us?

The financial dimension – how do our owners see us?

The business process dimension – how effective and efficient are our business processes?

The learning and innovation dimension – how well do we generate and adopt new knowledge?

In 2005, Dr Hubert K. Rampersad, a research academic focusing on scorecards and also a personal branding expert suggested that a personal balanced scorecard may also be an innovative approach to self-organisation.

Rampersad proposes the following four dimensions for a personal balanced scorecard:

Internal – your physical and mental state. How can you control these to create value for yourself and others? How can you feel good in your own skin – at work as well as in your spare time?

External – your relations with your spouse, children, friends, employers, colleagues and others. How do they see you?

Choose the Dimensions That Matter

Knowledge and learning – your skills and learning ability. How do you learn, and how can you enable yourself to be successful now and in the future?

Financial – financial stability. To what degree are you able to fulfil your financial needs?

These four elements should form the basis of your personal mission, vision and how you define your key role in situations. This will, of course, spill over into the ambitions that inspire your personal objectives, give rise to certain performance targets and are the yardstick by which you measure yourself and guide actions for daily improvement.

The essential wisdom contained in the personal balanced scorecard approach is that we need to look at our lives systematically (i.e. holistically) – whether you do it through a tool such as the balanced scorecard or through other means, we need to consider how our actions are shaping our reality and realise that our spiritual and emotional outlook in life ends up shaping our day-to-day reality.

In terms of awakening that potential in ourselves, education is one of the best way to share ideas, open our minds and connect with our inner selves and to learn to express ourselves in the outer world.

Challenge yourself today to face your fears, and consider what your next steps will be in enhancing your life´s goals. It may be that you need to engage in a journey of gaining knowledge, so that you can gain wisdom and fulfilment – or it may be that you need to change your every day to realise the possible.

Whatever it is –no tool will create action – you still need to get up, move forward and stretch yourself to get to the next level every day.

With regard to the business world, Angel who co-authored a paper with Rampersad titled “Do scorecards add up?” (2005), identify several reasons – all ultimately the result of a lack of individual and organisational alignment – why balanced scorecards fail:

Businesses follow an accounting-or financial only-approach with a systematic neglect of human capital.

There is no link between the critical success factors of the organisation and the critical success factors of individuals – creating human capital tensions between work and non-work aspirations.

There is no link between shared ambition and organisational objectives, leading businesses to be unable to respond quickly to new market opportunities due to resistance to change.

There is no link between personal ambitions and ethical behaviours leading to a systematic neglect of personal integrity.

There is a divide between management and workers – creating a hostile communication culture.

A general lack of self- and team-learning results in a climate of defensiveness and mistrust and business strategy that is thus poorly understood and impossible to execute.

Too many objectives are defined and too many performance metrics are being measured.

Insufficient data available on individual and organisational performance results in the business being unable to actually measure the impact of scorecard measures.

Many of these lessons are also relevant to how we approach our own self-mastery and personal development.

Translate Values Into Measures

While these are recognisable reasons for organisations not to achieve their objectives – the real question must be how we can best align our personal behaviour and personal ambition. Some of the areas of contemplation that may aid in this process include:

Do I act in accordance with my conscience and a higher purpose?

Is there a consistency in what I think and what I do?

How do my ideals, ambitions, intentions and deepest desires fit my present actions?

Are my thoughts and practices working together to create harmony or are they contradictory and moving me away from the peace I already have?

Do I act in accordance with my personal ambition?

Is my personal ambitions grounded in ethical, spiritually correct and emotionally clear actions?

Are there any contradictions in my personal ambitions? Where do they come from and is there anything that I need to do to resolve these contradictions?

In what ways does my behaviour influence my views and my views influence my behaviours?

Am I doing the right things internally, externally, through learning and development and financially to enable my ambitions?

Practicing this personal reflection framework daily will allow you to determine how close you are to realising your ambitions (or if your ambitions themselves have changed). In time, your behaviour will grow increasingly aligned with the best possible path towards the achievement of your goals.

When you are ready to build skills to support your development towards your personal ambitions – remember that education challenges you to achieve this personal development within the context of the skills that are required to support your development in these areas.

Sources:

Rampersad, H.K. (2006) Personal Balanced Scorecard: The Way to Individual Happiness, Personal Integrity, And Organizational Effectiveness, USA, Information Age Publishing.

Angel, R.& Rampersad, H.K. (2005) Do personal balanced scorecards add up? Performance. CA-Magazine, May 2005 – Print Edition,pp.6