Ever find yourself comparing your life with the flamboyant next door neighbours or the Facebook-addicted friends from school, so busy having glamourous holidays they manage to find time to post photos of it just to taunt you? No, me neither. Benchmarking is rarely an uplifting experience because there’s always somebody richer, more successful or better looking than you. It’s a futile exercise because you always fail to understand whether others are genuinely happy with where they are in their lives – or at least as much they want you to believe.
We were reminded of the perils of benchmarking this week as we helped a client accelerate their sustainability journey. Armed with some sustainability benchmarking info supplied by well-known management consultants, they were disheartened to see just how far behind the game they were. However, a closer inspection of which other companies were in the benchmarking revealed how unfair the comparison was and how incorrect it was to conclude they were under-performing on sustainability metrics.
You see, it all depends how ambitious you are as a business and how far along the sustainability journey you are. The secret to any benchmarking is to compare apples with apples, otherwise you will draw the wrong conclusions.
Sustainability Ambition x Journey – ensuring a like-for-like.
Clearly, those with high sustainability ambitions will be investing more in the agenda and those who started their journey earlier will have a more mature approach and infrastructure. Comparing a Light-Touch Laggard with an Experienced Performer is of no help to anybody. The latter should be doing a great job and that doesn’t mean everyone else should be disappointed with their progress or performance. It’s far more helpful to define your peers based on these 2 dimensions and then see how well or badly you are doing vs the appropriate sub-set of businesses. And if you are going to look at those who are more mature and ambitious, then do so to extract the learnings and insights rather than for a point of direct comparison. Thinking in this way allows you to assess sustainability performance not in absolute, but in relation to likely and reasonable expectations – a far more helpful assessment.
It's akin to working out whether those people you follow on social media really are happy with their lives rather than just assume it’s only your life that’s a total bin fire!
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