I worked with a race engineer once who coached and mechanic’d on the European F2 circuit. Her most often applied skill was dealing with the personalities of the different drivers from different countries, all of whom had their own driving style. One or two of them might have had an ego.
Even on identical cars on the same course, drivers will brake, steer, throttle, corner, lap, and overtake differently. This has an effect on, among other things, tire wear, which affects speed as the laps progress. Which factors into when and how often to make tire changes. As the race engineer, she had to optimize the car set up (tire angle, suspension stiffness, downforce, and tire pressure) for each driver to maximize their speed and minimize their pit stops. The more you trade tires for speed, the slower you’re going on the 30th lap, and if you stop for fresh tires more often than the other guy they will lap you.
That’s a lot of compounding variables to have to keep track of, which I suppose is part of what makes racing interesting.
This is what computer scientists and mathematicians call an “P-NP” problem. It’s easy to check the results: did the driver lap faster? But it’s not easy to find the solution, or even know if a solution exists. There’s a million dollar prize for whoever solves it.
https://www.claymath.org/millennium/p-vs-np/
Measurement, metrics, and quantification are important. If you don’t understand how your systems, processes, and execution comes together, you’re not going to be able to improve them. But (big but) defining success and then whipping the team to meet that goal / number / metric / KPI without understanding how to get there is not leadership. That’s abuse.
Let’s say your business decides to improve customer satisfaction. And let’s say you start by commissioning a survey. Solid first move. You now have a number you can measure improvement against.
Talking about the number, what the number is, what the number was last week, why the number isn’t going up, exhorting your team to improve the number, making the number a priority, is not going to change change the number. The number is just the result of everything that goes into making your customer satisfied.1
Leadership is figuring out how to give the people who create customer satisfaction the tools, training, and support they need to give your customer a better experience. Diving into the responses to the survey. Talking to the people at the front lines who might have a helpful perspective, given all the institutional knowledge they carry . Try to understand, not imagine, what it takes to deliver your product or service. Understand what goes into being successful and removing obstacles to said success.2
The number is just the result. It’s not the work needed to get that result.
- Actually, it is. People are going to make sure the number moves in the direction of their incentives. But not always by doing the things that actually improve customer satisfaction. But that’s a different topic. ↩︎
- I mean actually getting out and seeing with your own eyes. Sergeant Lenton taught me that “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.”, which means, in part, that assumptions are what will kill you. But that’s another topic too. ↩︎
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