Our departmental scorecards are showing great numbers, but when we roll them up to the leadership team scorecard, the numbers do not tell the same story. How do we align departmental metrics with leadership metrics?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When departmental scorecards are green but the leadership scorecard is red, you have a classic alignment problem. This usually happens because departmental metrics are disconnected from the primary drivers of the company's high-level health.

To fix this, you must run a top-down alignment exercise during your quarterly meeting or a focused session. Start with your leadership scorecard and look at the key metrics that are failing. Then, look at the departmental scorecards and trace the upstream activities.

For example, if the leadership scorecard shows a red metric for weekly closed sales, but the marketing department scorecard is completely green for leads generated, those leads are likely unqualified. The marketing department needs to change their metric from raw leads to qualified leads that meet specific criteria defined by sales. Every departmental metric must act as a building block that directly supports and feeds into a leadership team metric. If a department head is hitting their numbers but the overall company is missing its targets, those departmental metrics are vanity metrics that must be redesigned to drive true cross-functional success.