Unfortunately, the organization's strategy may be only in one person's head, or it seems to change with the wind, or is not followed at all by anyone in the organization. When a team discovers that it doesn't understand the organization's strategy, it must stop progress and get briefed by someone who does understand it. In the sad event that there is no clear organizational strategy, the team will have to presume a strategy and run it past the sponsoring manager for confirmation. Once the strategy is set or understood by the team members, work can proceed on refining performance measures. High Performance Teams are chartered to improve performance in some way.
Performance is associated with speed, quality, cost, and effectiveness.
Finding good measures on these variables is not always easy. Effectiveness is very elusive and in the service industry. Quality may be difficult to define as well. Cost and speed are less difficult to get a handle on, but they have their pitfalls and problems as well. To top all this off, most of us are blinded by the current set of performance measures we maintain.