As a bipartisan group of current and former government executives, business leaders, public management scholars, and journalists we urge you to make results-focused management a priority. Embrace performance management, the use of goals and performance measures as a management tool, as a critical aspect of your work.

Responding to crises and debating and deliberating policy can consume all of your time if you let it. Even experienced leaders can neglect investments in management. We urge you to recognize this syndrome, and resist it.

Performance measurement can help you drive progress toward your goals. Resist the tendency to treat performance goals and measurements as just a legal requirement. If you don’t, you will squander a powerful lever for change.

People like to do well. Ambitious but achievable goals energize staff.

Even without a direct link to goals or rewards, feedback also improves performance. Performance measures also help people see where their efforts are paying off and where they need adjustment.

Beyond communicating your priorities, performance measures reveal what works and what doesn’t. This enables an agency to replicate what works well and abandon what does not.

Debate over priorities is healthy and natural in a democracy. By setting clear goals and reporting concrete progress, agency leaders facilitate better-informed deliberation among the public and its representatives.

Outcome goals focus agency staff on what ultimately needs to be accomplished, energize staff, and make it easier to enlist external cooperation. The flexibility of outcome-focused goals also encourages innovation. You will hear many logical reasons why outcome measures are not appropriate or obtainable for your organization. Listen carefully, but insist on the clarity of purpose revealed by outcome measures.

If everything is a priority, nothing is. Concentrate on a few strategic goals—five at most, and better fewer. Pick goals that are conceptually simple. Express them in plain English. Build your performance measurement and management system to support them.

Set stretch targets. Challenges motivate. But don’t stretch past the point of realism. Work carefully with your agency to frame goals that are ambitious but not overwhelming.

Help the people in your organization understand how they are expected to contribute to each organizational goal, who has lead responsibility for what, and who has supporting responsibilities. After setting strategic goals, help your organization sort out how the goals cascade down and connect to the work of individual work units and fold back up to meet agency-wide expectations.

Performance management cannot be a paper exercise. Performance measures are powerful when used on a regular basis. Talk about your goals and progress measurements to Congress, the press, your managers, the whole agency, and individual agency employees. Routine use of performance measures signals that even as other issues arise that demand attention, your priorities cannot be set aside. They are, in fact, priorities.

Make performance information visible. Write it clearly. Distribute it widely. Post it where people will use it.

Invite your agency to explore with you why performance is strong in some places and weak in others. Promote the organizational habit of analyzing past performance to craft better plans. Pose your questions in ways that encourage use of performance measures as a learning tool.

Up-to-date, detailed data let you detect performance problems. Outdated reports make it hard to reconstruct the events that might explain performance variations. Fresh, frequent outcome-focused performance reports show when variations arise. This, in turn, makes it easier to find and fix the causes of poor performance.

The ability to segment information (by geographic region, client characteristics, industrial sector, intervention strategy, or whatever breakdowns matter for your agency) makes it easier to interpret results, draw lessons, and improve performance.

Measures have to be firmly rooted in reality, and seen as such within and beyond your agency. Treat measurement accuracy as an essential and integral component of your performance measurement system.