A Simplified Organizational Scorecard

NOTE: If you’re attending the PRINTING United Expo 2026 in Las Vegas September 23-25, check out my session: Performance Management: Linking Strategy with Results on Wednesday, September 24 at 3pm.

It’s an enduring challenge for organizational leaders: How to track enterprise-wide progress in a simplified yet meaningful way. Here’s a process that does both.

Setting organizational goals is best done by the senior leadership team. The specific targets chosen for measuring enterprise-wide performance should reflect the strategic intent of the business. Ideally, these will come directly from your strategic plan and will address three distinct, yet interrelated areas:

• 1. Financial Targets
• 2. Sales & Service Targets
• 3. Strategic Targets

Financial targets are just that. Revenue, profitability, efficiency, and cost control are examples. You may also use value added, EBITDA, and gross profit percentage. Consistency is needed to compare month to month and year over year results. Build benchmarks to monitor progress. It is important to keep these simple, measurable, and easy to understand and communicate.

Sales and service targets are next. What do you want to sell and to whom? New products/services to existing customers? Existing products/services to new customers? Customer service goals such as on-time delivery, accounts receivable days, spoilage/unforced errors (especially those identified by the customer), client satisfaction ratings, customer lifetime value are a few. What matters most is that they are measurable and meaningful.

Strategic targets are a bit different. These are goals that are important to accomplish even though they may not yield a tangible outcome in the current planning year. These are so important to your future development that it would not make sense to ignore them when measuring organizational performance. Examples of strategic targets may include installation and training on a new software system, launching a new marketing effort, testing new product offerings, staff training or custom, proprietary technology development. Since these targets are more qualitative than quantitative, whether and to what extent they are accomplished is a bit subjective. Nevertheless, strategic targets should be included to round out this balanced approach to organizational performance tracking.

Once identified and captured, a scoring mechanism may be added. I recommend 50% for financial targets, 35% for sales and service targets and 15% for strategic targets. You and your leadership team can establish the percentage allocation that makes the most sense for your organization.

That done, calculate and report on results quarterly. Share this with staff mangers and supervisors and/or with the entire organization as you deem fit.

Keeping track and reporting on organizational performance keeps everyone on track, informed and connected. Over time, this will help build a stronger, more committed team.

For more information on tracking organizational results and linking this with individual team member performance (including a instructions and worksheets) contact me at joe@ajstrategy.com.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.