Barometers for how records is doing in your organisation and measuring the unquantifiable

I was listening to a podcast recently with a mental performance coach who works on all the soft stuff for a US based major league baseball team.

The type of work that he does is the type that's almost impossible to measure directly - mindset, attitude - those sorts of things.

He shared his story about how the general manager of that team assesses whether he's making a meaningful contribution.

It's simple.

The GM looks at the reaction the other coaches have when he enters the room.

The logic is simple.

These are all high performance people.

If they believe that a mindset coach is meaningfully improving performance, people will be fighting over their time, and treating them with the respect that they treat someone whose contribution they feel is meaningful.

If they don't feel the other person is making a meaningful contribution to the teams performance, they'll probably be indifferent to them, or actively avoid them.

I know that records can make a meaningful impact on the performance of organisations because I've worked with organisations where it does, and the staff know it.

In those organisations there's a definite difference in how staff, managers and executives treat the records team - they treat them like a partner who is meaningfully invested in their own performance.

I've also told people the field I work in, and had them groan before giving me a 20 minute tirade about how much they hate their records system.

The reason I think this is important, is that records is not an island discipline.

The number of projects we can do that don't touch the rest of the organisation is vanishingly small, and I would also say that those projects are the least meaningful projects.

So if people aren't treating us like we're helpful, and a partner in improving their performance - we're not going to get their support when we want to do a project that touches their area of the organisation.

How do people in your organisation respond when you enter the room?