Computerworld - The other day, after speaking to an audience of technical people about the importance of building good relationships at work, a young help desk manager asked, "What metrics should I monitor for that?" I realized that he was trying to reconcile the importance of relationships with a conflicting tenet of his managerial faith that says, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

We geeks love that idea. It meshes with our preference for objectively verifiable facts over squishy subjectivity. We find metrics comforting, having been taught to expect constant feedback on the question "How am I doing?" We get grades on tests and papers. We get scores in video games. We get raises and promotions at work. But our ardor for this explicit feedback loop can lead us astray. We take it too far, transforming the not-meant-to-be-taken-literally "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" into the absurd dogma "If you can't measure it, it doesn't matter."

With that mantra as our lodestar, we not only ignore hard-to-measure aspects of work such as relationships, but also self-righteously see that approach as a virtue. You can see this mindset play out in numerous destructive ways...

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