Personal Balanced Scorecard Concept
PERSONAL BALANCED SCORECARD VERSUS KAPLAN & NORTON’S BALANCED SCORECARD
The Personal Balanced Scorecard differs in essential ways from Kaplan & Norton’s traditional Balanced Scorecard.
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The implementation of Kaplan & Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) concept deviates in a number of points from the Personal Balanced ScorecardTM (PBSC) concept. In practice the brilliant Kaplan and Norton approach is applied as mechanistic and too results driven, the PBSC process ensures that business results are achieved through a focus on people. This is very important for sustainable performance improvement and developing a real learning organisation.
The PBSC, in contrast with Kaplan & Norton’s Balanced Scorecard, integrates people involvement and happiness into balanced scorecard and involves individual buy-in, in order to realize sustainable personal and organizational performance improvement. It is linking human capital to business success. That’s why numerous case studies indicate that the implementation of the BSC in North America have been disappointing at best, and in Europe and South America even more so.
Despite the above criticism the BSC is a splendid concept that makes a most useful contribution to the successful implementation of the PBSC.
Ten for BSC Implementation Failures
- Applied as mechanistic and too results driven, with no linkage between the critical success factors of the organization and the personal critical success factors of individual employees-- creating human capital tensions between work and non-work aspirations.
- Emphasis mainly on financial measures rather than non-financial, leading to measures that do not connect to the drivers of the business and are not relevant to performance improvement.
- No explicit link between shared ambition and specific organizational objectives; results in insufficient employee support to work according to organizational performance measures and an implementation plan that is not grounded in reality and unable to respond quickly to unforeseen events.
- No explicit link between personal ambition and ethical behavior; neglect of personal integrity and business ethics.
- No explicit link between personal ambition and shared ambition.
- Poor communication of the new way of working by management; results in creation of an employee mentality that is hostile to management messages.
- Results in an individual performance plan that focuses too much on the money side and not enough on delivering organizational values, leading to a “what’s in it for me” culture.
- Self learning and team learning are not facilitated; results in creation of a climate of defensiveness and mistrust and a business strategy that is poorly understood and therefore impossible to execute.
- Too many objectives defined and too many performance metrics being measured.
- Data on current individual and organizational performance insufficiently available; poor data on actual performance, negating most of the effort invested in defining performance measures by not being able to monitor actual changes in results from changes in behavior.
Ten Ways in Which The Personal Balanced Scorecard Helps You Know and Help Yourself and Others:
- By distancing yourself from your mindset and listening effectively to your inner voice, you are able to identify your inner strengths, gifts and personal goals and therefore create your future and discover your destiny.
- Self-learning and working smarter instead of harder through learning and knowledge of the self. We become more creative as we grow more conscious of ourselves—our real character, inner processes and driving forces. This leads to inner harmony.
- Personal integrity; aligning and balancing your personal ambition with your personal behavior, you will create inner peace and improve your own credibility, as well as acting according to your conscience. The breathing and silence exercises will help turn your attention inward and to give you control over your self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy. When adopted as a habit, the breathing and silence exercises will develop a deep awareness of self at all times.
- Enjoyment at work; as a result of the balance between your personal ambition and the shared ambition, your inner involvement is increased and more warmth within the organization is created. Happiness is enhanced at work by reducing the gap between company life and normal life, and between the way people deal with their colleagues at work and the way they act with their friends and family in their spare time.
- Effective talent management; integration of the PBSC in the appraisal system results in a sustainable talent management process, which is related to a continued taking up of challenges and development of related skills.
- Team learning and trust; to stimulate individuals to share their personal ambition with each other so that they get to know, understand and appreciate each other better, which forms a stable basis for greater mutual respect and trust.
- Becoming a highly disciplined time manager by using your time effectively.
- Driving out fear; the PBSC is a philosophy, which creates conditions to eliminate all fears of employees and enable them to realize their full potential and contribute creatively.
- Reducing stress and burnout.
- Recruiting employees effectively. To ensure the necessary job fit by matching the personal ambition with the job requirements and with the shared organizational ambition.
The United States Air Force is trying to become more accountable for performance using the Balanced Scorecard method, but I like the way Dr. Hubert Rampersad has tied the BSC to a Personal Balanced Scorecard. It's almost like Kaplan & Norton meet Stephen Covey. -- Bob Marx, United States Air Force