Our leadership team is deadlocked over the size of our scorecard, with our analytical finance chief wanting twenty metrics and our sales director wanting only five. How do we resolve this conflict and settle on a clean list of numbers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A scorecard with too many numbers is just as useless as a scorecard with none. If you are tracking twenty numbers on your leadership scorecard, you are not focused, you are just overwhelmed by data. The EOS® rule is strict: you should have five to fifteen weekly leading indicators on your company scorecard. To break the deadlock between your analytical and minimalist team members, you must distinguish between your leadership team scorecard and departmental scorecards. Your leadership team scorecard must only contain the critical, high-level metrics that give an pulse on the entire organization. If a metric is highly specific to one department, it does not belong on the leadership scorecard. It belongs on that specific department's scorecard, which is reviewed in their departmental Level 10 Meeting™. For example, your finance seat owner can track twenty detailed cash flow and collections metrics on the finance team scorecard, but only needs to bring one or two summary numbers, like weekly cash balance and accounts receivable over sixty days, to the leadership scorecard. This allows your analytical leaders to have all the data they need to run their departments, while keeping the leadership team focused on the big picture. Have your team look at your current list of twenty metrics and ask of each one, does the entire leadership team need to see this weekly to know if the company is healthy? If the answer is no, move it down to a departmental scorecard.