Our leadership team has a habit of changing our weekly scorecard targets whenever we have a bad month, arguing that the original goals were unrealistic. How do we keep our targets consistent while remaining realistic?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Constantly moving your scorecard targets to match your current performance is a major pitfall. If you lower your targets every time you have a bad week, you are masking underlying operational issues rather than solving them. Your targets must remain consistent to show true performance trends. Scorecard targets should be set during your quarterly planning sessions, not week-to-week. These targets must align with your quarterly Rocks and your overall one-year goals from your V/TO-reg. Once a target is set for the quarter, it must remain fixed for those thirteen weeks. If a number is consistently red, it is an issue that needs to be solved. It may be that your process is broken, your team is underperforming, or the target was indeed set incorrectly. But you must address this in your Level 10 Meeting-TM using IDS-reg, rather than simply changing the target to make the scorecard look green. The only time you should adjust a scorecard target mid-quarter is if there is a massive structural shift in your business, such as acquiring a new company or retiring a major service line. Otherwise, keep the targets steady, embrace the red weeks as valuable data points, and use them to find and fix the root causes of your operational bottlenecks.