One of the constant and important challenges in leading is stewardship. When building a product you can add cost of goods sold and man hours, divide by sales and relatively simply get an idea of how profitable your activities are.
When you are adding services to provide value for clients, or programs for a church or community, how do you know if you are achieving enough on the investment?
It has to start with mission assessment: where are we seeing weakness in achieving our mission? Once this is properly analyzed it is important to set a quantitative goal aligned with the qualitative measure you are trying to correct.
For instance, if I begin spending man hours calling clients in an effort to increase customer satisfaction, what problem am I trying to solve? If I have measured customer satisfaction, and some feedback has told me that my customers would like more engagement or interaction, I have to build a set of metrics for the program in order to ratify that the program is working.
Too often, we do good or right sounding things that are not informed by mission or strategic metrics, leaving us no way of knowing whether they were the right things to do in the first place. That’s bad stewardship.