Are you measuring up? No, I don’t mean meeting a standard. Are you measuring the quality of your personal performance with a scale? Doing so let’s you track progress. Measuring to go up. One of the goals of Head4Knowledge is to provide personal scales of quality as easy to apply measures of performance quality. If you’re not familiar with PowerUp Self-Assessment, there are a number of posts at this site that you may read. See our chapter index.
How to Scale
An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises. — Mae West
A scale is a measurement stick. For most of our quality measures, we’ll use either a five-level scale or a three-level scale with labels on them. When you assess your own performance, use the scale to measure the quality in a particular performance. With a single scale, you can track improvement in that performance area. With multiple scales, you prioritize improvements so that you’re focused on the ones that will provide the greatest improvement in quality.
For example, you might want to improve your dental hygiene. You could have several performance areas, like the following.
Frequency from low to high: 1=never, 2=sometimes, 3=weekly, 4=2-3 times/week, 5=daily
Methods: 1=tooth-brush, 2=floss, 3=both
Effectiveness: 1=gums bleed and breath stinks, 2=gums bleed or breath stinks, but not both, 3=occasionally have bleeding or mouth odor, 4=no bleeding, no bad breath, 5=pink healthy gums, bright teeth, and sweet breath.
Those three scales may be enough to measure quality, or you may learn as you assess and build a habit that tweaking the scales or adding a scale would be helpful.
Going Up the Mountain of Personal Quality
Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality. – Ralph Marston
Whatever the performance that you want to improve, assessing, keeping the measure, and re-assessing for improvement is vital. Scales are easy to create, quick to apply, and easy to adjust as you gain experience with them. Importantly, they’re not tools to smack yourself, but gentle reminders of how to improve.
Having multiple scales to measure performance breaks it down into measurable parts. The many scales help you analyze a performance to know how to more easily give advice for improvement.
Next Steps
Practice measuring with scales. I gave dental hygiene as an example to give you a safe area for practice. Also, practice adjusting or creating new scales to help with your self-improvement. Finally, subscribe below to our blog for learners, and receive regular updates. We plan to publish multiple scales you can use, right out of the box.
Go climb your personal quality mountain.
Credit
Photo by patricia serna on Unsplash.
Further Reading
- PowerUp: Improve Your Performance Power with 6 Steps and 4 Elements (10/8/2017)
- Educational Vampires — PowerUp to Protect Yourself and Loved Ones (updated) (10/10/2017)
- Are you learning the slow way? 6 Steps and 4 Elements to PowerUp Learning & Performance (10/13/2017)
- Ready for Your Future? How to Commit to Your Dreams (10/17/2017)
- How to Scale the Mountain of Personal Quality (11/2/2017)
- Power Up Growth. How to Conquer Life’s Challenges. (11/12/2017)
- How to Overcome 10 Common Barriers to College Success (12/6/2017)