Every time we set a weekly activity target on our Scorecard, our team figures out a way to hit the quantity while sacrificing the quality of the work. How do we design pairing metrics to prevent our people from gaming the system?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you manage strictly by a single activity number, human nature takes over. Your team will optimize for the metric rather than the business outcome. If you track cold calls, you will get a high volume of low quality calls. If you track support tickets closed, your team will rush clients off the phone. To stop this behavior, you must implement paired metrics.

A paired metric couples a quantity metric with a quality metric. Every speed or activity metric on your weekly Scorecard must have a corresponding guardrail metric owned by the same seat on the Accountability Chart. For example, if your sales seat has a target for outbound prospect meetings, pair it with a minimum qualification rate. If your customer service seat tracks average ticket resolution time, pair it with a weekly customer satisfaction score.

This approach prevents gaming because your people cannot make one number look good by destroying the other. It forces them to operate with healthy tension. If they try to game the quantity, the quality metric immediately goes red, triggering an IDS issue in your weekly Level 10 Meeting™.

As an owner, you must design these paired metrics to align with the natural strengths of your team. This matches what research emphasizes: building systems that leverage innate talents rather than trying to fix human behaviors after the fact. When you pair quantity and quality, you build a self-correcting Scorecard that protects your customer experience and preserves the integrity of your weekly data.