By Emily Moon, Deputy City Administrator, Issaquah, Washington

Think about deliberately using your performance measurement program as a professional development tool. Here are a few reasons why you should and how you might go about it:

• For your newbies: Give a less experienced employee or an intern the opportunity to learn about the wide array of municipal services that your community delivers by challenging her to collect needed data (beyond the departments she might be assigned to). This will give her the opportunity to work with other departments and to learn about their operations. Encourage her to sit down with key staff in those departments to ask "Why is this piece of information important to the department, the city manager, the council or the public? What challenges do we have in collecting this data? What other performance measures, context or facts are needed to fully understand what this data is telling us?"
• For your upcoming leaders: Direct employees whom you think might make excellent managers someday to facilitate your annual data collection process and to co-lead the public reporting effort. You can rotate and overlap these responsibilities so that your future leaders can, over time, gain the experience of managing a jurisdiction-wide project. They will learn to build collaborative networks, stretch their analytical skills, challenge themselves to think from another's perspective and will hone their communication skills.
• For your management team: As part of their annual performance objectives, assign division and department directors the task of researching ideas for two new performance measures that could significantly help tell the department's story or that are measures commonly used elsewhere and for which your municipality could gather useful comparative data. Require these managers to provide a robust explanation at a management team meeting of why these measures were the ones they chose. Welcome the opportunity to talk about what opportunities and risks might result from reporting on these new measures. Encourage them to share what resources they might need in order to collect this data or to fully interpret the data once it is collected.

Don't just squeeze facts and figures from your performance measurement program. Leverage it as a way to develop the potential of your staff and to challenge them to strive for continuous self-reflection and improvement.