I suspect some of my department heads are gaming their weekly Scorecard numbers to ensure they always hit their targets, even though our actual operational performance feels sluggish. How do we audit our metrics to ensure we are looking at objective truth rather than sanitized data?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your team games their weekly numbers, they are choosing comfort over the health of the company. This usually happens because they fear the consequences of a red metric on the Scorecard, turning what should be an objective diagnostic tool into a political shield. If your metrics are constantly green but your actual operations feel chaotic, you have a mismatch between your metrics and reality.

To stop this gaming of data, you must change how you define your metrics. Shift from subjective tracking, like percentage of project completed, to binary, absolute numbers, such as contracts signed or support tickets resolved within one hour. Absolute numbers are much harder to manipulate because they are tied to hard system records rather than self-reported estimates.

Next, look at how you run your Level 10 Meeting™. If your team is berated or penalized every time a number goes red, they will naturally find ways to make the data look green. Red is not a failure; it is simply an early warning signal that requires IDS®. When you treat a red metric as an opportunity to solve a systemic problem rather than a personal failure, your team will stop manipulating the data. If a leader continues to report sanitized numbers that do not match operational reality, they likely do not GWC™ their seat.