You Get What You Measure: Using Metrics to Construct Effective “Score Cards” for Legal Aid Advocates and Offices

A few years ago at a “Leadership and Diversity Training” for Virginia project directors I was introduced for the first time to the business management maxim “You get what you measure.” 1 For those of you as unenlightened as I was at the time, here’s the gist of this insight. The metrics an organization collects send the strong message that those measures are what are truly important. In fact, the message could well be that these metrics are the only things that are important, to the exclusion of anything else. Employees take their cues about what is important in their job performance from the things that management chooses to measure – so “tell me how you will measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave.”