Benchmarking is one of those areas, like performance ranking, that everyone just goes along with as a great idea. Let’s look at the leader in our industry and copy some of the things they do and then maybe we will be the leader. Let’s use the information we gather to make sure we adjust when they adjust- we do not want to fall behind after all.
If you stand in the center of an organization (or the top or the bottom) and choose to stay there because that is your home (and these days that is a fantastic thing- I am mocking benchmarking not those who get trapped in it) this exercise looks rosy. Best way to get the best right?
Well to be blunt, no.
If you stand on the outside and then go from one benchmarked firm to the next you see the ridiculousness of the exercise. They are all doing the same thing! And they bring in externals to help them fix and repair it. Disclosure at this spot- I actually like benchmarking as an exercise (however futile). It is easy to do if I have been at the benchmarked firm (and I usually have), it takes a lot of time (which of course needs to be billed- but, I prefer to bill for solutions rather than reinforcing status quo which leads to fixes) and it is a fascinating study in what people and organizations hold dear (and can’t see past).
Let me give you another example that people (middle level leaders especially) get tripped up on. Someone goes out and “benchmarks” with their own set of questions to get the answers they are looking for to return to all those firms and provide a package. What they end up doing (this is really true with change management) is getting a whole lot of feedback about symptoms rather than root causes. In other words they benchmark the information into a data set that will feel good for the recipient.
This is called “best practices” and it is a synonym for benchmarking. What if, just what if, all those people surveyed are going about it the wrong way. What if they are operating in a flat world only because they never bothered to look to see if there actually was an edge? Did I mention change management has this problem too?
