We have thirty different metrics on our leadership Level 10 Meeting™ Scorecard because every department head wants their data represented, which makes our five-minute scorecard review drag on for fifteen minutes. How do we cut down our scorecard to only the truly predictive metrics?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A healthy leadership team Scorecard should contain only five to fifteen high level, activity based, weekly metrics. Having thirty metrics is not a scorecard, it is a database. It dilutes focus, creates noise, and guarantees that you will waste valuable time reviewing minor details that do not belong at the leadership level.

To fix this, go through a brutal reduction exercise. For every metric on your current scorecard, ask: If this number goes red, does it indicate a systemic threat to our overall business or exit readiness? If the answer is no, or if the metric only impacts a single department, remove it from the leadership Scorecard.

Those departmental metrics do not disappear, they simply get pushed down to the departmental Level 10 Meetings™ where they belong. The leadership Scorecard must only track the vital signs of the business.

Focus on activity based, leading indicators that predict future results, rather than lagging indicators that only tell you what happened last month. By keeping your scorecard to a clean list of fifteen metrics or fewer, you can review it in under five minutes and quickly identify which off track numbers need to be dropped to the Issues List.