What is your “Say:Do” ratio?

In a previous entry I underscored the importance of putting your plan in writing and clearly communicating it to the team. Here’s another important step to effectively engage employees: you need to actually do what you said you’d do. Let me introduce a conceptual “metric” that helps me think about this… it is called the “Say/Do Ratio” and is derived as follows:

WHAT YOU SAY / WHAT YOU DO = “SAY:DO RATIO”

The goal, of course, is to have a say/do ratio of 100%. Don’t bother trying to track hard data and come up with a precise calculation for yourself… instead you should simply evaluate every decision you make in light of a 100% goal for say/do.

Coming next: How to improve your Say:Do ratio.