Recorded, never read

In 2008, a team of economists led by Nicholas Bloom started working with a group of large textile firms headquartered in Mumbai. These were big, family-owned businesses with several plants each, and many of them were badly managed in a very particular way.

They recorded almost everything. Before the study, 93% of the plants that would receive help recorded their quality defects. Only 29% monitored them daily or by type of defect, and none had any standard way to analyse the records and act on them.

The researchers hired a leading international consultancy and randomly chose which plants got free help adopting 38 basic management practices - monitoring quality, tracking inventory, setting targets, organising the factory floor. Productivity in the treated plants rose 17% in the first year, through better quality, more efficiency and less inventory.

Then, in 2017, they went back. About half of the practices had been dropped.

Recorded isn’t the same as read.

Management is a technology, and like any technology it decays unless someone maintains it - whether it’s a weaving plant or the CRM behind your pipeline review.

Why this matters for leaders

Most go-to-market teams are in the same position as those plants. We record a huge amount - every touch, every stage change, every forecast call. Far less of it is reviewed on a regular rhythm, and less still changes a decision.

Leadership advice tends to focus on vision, culture and character. Those matter. But the most rigorous evidence on what makes organisations productive points somewhere less glamorous: the basic routines of monitoring, targets and follow-through.

So I’ve broken it into three parts: why management works like a technology, why even experts respond to the basics, and what makes good practices last.

1. Management is a technology

The Indian trial is the cleanest evidence that management practices cause better performance, rather than just going with it. The authors estimated that the changes added about $325,000 a year in profit per plant. And they concluded that the main reason firms hadn’t adopted the practices already was information: many owners simply didn’t know about them or what they’d do.

Large surveys point the same way. In 2007, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen scored management practices in 732 medium-sized firms across the US, France, Germany and the UK. Better practices were strongly associated with productivity, profitability and survival, and every country had a long tail of very badly managed firms.

The most striking result for anyone running a region came later. With the US Census Bureau, Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson et al. surveyed around 35,000 manufacturing plants. Management practices accounted for more than 20% of the variation in productivity - as much as or more than R&D, IT or the skills of the workforce. And 40% of the variation in management practices was between plants inside the same firm.

My inference is that the gap between your best and worst region, or your best and worst team, might have less to do with market or talent than we assume - and more to do with whether the basic routines are in place.

2. Even experts respond to the basics

You might expect this to apply to factories and not to highly skilled professionals. The evidence suggests otherwise.

In a field experiment with Virgin Atlantic, Greer Gosnell, John List and Robert Metcalfe studied 335 captains over eight months. They tested four management practices - performance monitoring, feedback, target setting and incentives in the form of donations to charity - by randomly assigning captains to different groups. Monitoring and target setting in particular significantly increased captains’ productivity on the fuel-saving behaviours being targeted, with knock-on gains in job satisfaction. The charity incentive didn’t change fuel efficiency much further, but those captains reported higher job satisfaction.

These were experienced pilots, not junior staff. They didn’t need training on how to save fuel. What changed was that someone was paying attention, and that there was a clear target.

I think that’s the lesson for leading experienced teams. Senior sellers and marketers don’t need to be told how to do their jobs. But they still respond to a clear, visible measure and a specific goal - and the absence of one is not the same as trust.

3. What makes practices last

So if basic practices work, why did half of them disappear?

The 2017 follow-up asked. The two most common reasons were managerial turnover and a lack of director time. When the manager who ran the routine left, or the owner stopped paying attention, the routine faded. Even so, the treated plants still had better practices and better performance than the control plants nine years on.

The follow-up also found something hopeful. Few practices spread from one firm to another, but many spread within firms - from the plants that got help to the firm’s other plants.

From that, the evidence points to a few things that help:

Make the routine the system, not the person. If practices die when a manager leaves, they need to live in the calendar, the dashboards and the onboarding, not in one person’s head.

Protect leadership time for the rhythm. Director time was one of the two main reasons practices faded. The weekly review only survives if the most senior person keeps turning up to it.

Spread it inside the firm. Practices travelled between plants in the same company far more easily than between companies. A routine that works in one region or team is the cheapest thing to copy into the next.

Measure what you want to change, and set a target. The captains improved most on the behaviours that were monitored and targeted. Pick the few that matter rather than tracking everything.

What good looks like

A few checks I’d use on any team’s operating rhythm:

• Recorded isn’t reviewed. For each metric you collect, name the meeting where it’s looked at and the decision it informs.
• A small number of targets. A clear goal on the few behaviours that matter most, visible to the team.
• Written down. Every routine documented well enough that a new manager could run it in their first week.
• The senior person shows up. The leader’s attendance is part of the practice.
• Copy from inside first. Before buying a new framework, find the best-run team in your own company and borrow theirs.
• Don’t confuse monitoring with micromanaging. The captains were measured, not instructed - and their job satisfaction went up, not down.

For me, yes and no

There’s a fair challenge here. These studies were about weaving plants, factories and fuel efficiency. Knowledge work is harder to measure, and over-measuring it can do real harm.

I agree. None of these studies looked at sales or marketing teams, and a target on the wrong measure can do damage. The step to your team is my inference.

But the pattern is consistent across textile plants, US manufacturing and airline captains: basic, structured routines of monitoring and target setting improve performance, and they fade when the people who maintain them leave or stop paying attention. For me, the operating rhythm is one of the least glamorous parts of leadership and one of the best evidenced.

Where to start on Monday

1. Audit what you record. List the metrics your team collects, and next to each one, the meeting where it’s reviewed. Strike out the ones with no meeting.
2. Write down one routine. Pick your most important weekly review and document it so someone else could run it tomorrow.
3. Find your best internal practice. Ask which team or region in your company runs the review you’d most like to copy, and sit in on it.

Three tests to run

1. A visible target might lift a behaviour more than monitoring alone. Pick one leading behaviour, such as follow-up within 24 hours. Show half the team their own numbers each week, and show the other half their numbers plus a specific target. Measure the behaviour and the meetings it produces over a quarter.
2. A weekly review of one metric could improve it more than a monthly dashboard. For two matched teams, review the same metric weekly in one and monthly in the other. Measure the metric and how quickly problems are acted on.
3. A documented routine might survive a change of manager better than an informal one. When a team lead changes, compare a team whose rhythm is written down with one whose isn’t. Measure whether the routines are still running, and the team’s results, three months later.