Every single number on our weekly leadership Scorecard is green, but our executive team is constantly working eighty hours a week and our internal processes feel like they are completely held together by duct tape. What are we missing?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Your Scorecard is tracking results but ignoring the human cost of achieving them. This is a classic trap: your metrics measure the what but completely fail to measure the how. When teams overcompensate through sheer brute force, your numbers look healthy on paper while your organizational capacity is on the verge of collapse.

To fix this, you must introduce capacity and friction metrics to your leadership Scorecard. If your operations are burning people out, you are tracking the wrong indicators. You need to start tracking weekly leading indicators that show operational stress before it turns into employee turnover.

Consider adding these metrics to your Scorecard:
- Average weekly overtime hours worked by department.
- Open support ticket backlog age or rollover rates.
- Number of process deviations or manual workarounds reported.
- Weekly team temperature check or pulse score.

If your delivery numbers are green but your overtime hours are spiking, your Scorecard will immediately flag that your success is unsustainable. This allows your leadership team to drop the capacity issue down to the Issues List and solve it during your Level 10 Meeting before you lose key employees. Running on data means tracking the health of your operational engine, not just the speed of the car.