We have several metrics on our weekly Scorecard that have been green for over six months without a single miss. Our team thinks this is a sign of great performance, but it feels like we are wasting valuable space on our Scorecard. How do we handle targets that are consistently too easy to hit?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If a metric on your Scorecard is green for six months straight, it is no longer serving its purpose as an active management tool. A perfect scorecard is often a sign of sandbagging or low standards. The purpose of your Scorecard is to give you an early warning system for issues in your business, not to make your team feel good with a wall of green boxes. When a number is consistently green, you have two choices. First, you can raise the target. If your team is hitting their weekly sales call target of fifty with ease, raise the bar to seventy five to test their capacity and push growth. Second, if the target is already at its optimal level for the business, remove it from the leadership Scorecard and delegate it to a departmental scorecard. This keeps the metric active at the ground level where the work is done, but frees up a highly valuable slot on your leadership Scorecard for a metric that requires active management, monitoring, or problem solving. Your leadership Scorecard should only track the vital few metrics that tell you if the business is healthy and moving forward. Keep the standards high, and do not let easy targets hide operational stagnation.