When selecting our 5 to 15 weekly Scorecard numbers, our leadership team struggles to separate high-level business health from departmental management metrics. How do we decide what stays on the leadership Scorecard versus what drops to departmental Scorecards?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The leadership team Scorecard is the pulse of the entire company, not an aggregation of departmental task lists. It must contain the 5 to 15 numbers that give you a complete, objective snapshot of operational and commercial health in less than five minutes. If a metric only informs the day-to-day management of one functional unit, it belongs on that department's Scorecard, not the leadership table.

Apply three filtering tests to decide where a measurable belongs:
- The cross-functional impact test. If this number goes red, does it trigger a breakdown in other departments within thirty to sixty days? For example, qualified discovery calls impact sales pipeline, which later impacts operations fulfillment. That belongs on the leadership Scorecard. Code commit frequency only impacts engineering task throughput; that stays in the departmental Scorecard.
- The desert island test. If you were stranded on an island with zero email or phone access and could only receive a single sheet of paper every week with 5 to 15 numbers on it, would you know if the enterprise was thriving or dying?
- The ultimate owner test. The measurable must be owned by the leadership team member accountable for that seat on the Accountability Chart, representing the core output of their function.

Department heads should manage twenty to thirty metrics within their own departmental Level 10 Meetings, but they roll up only one to three vital pulse metrics to the leadership table.