When you run multiple business units or entities, trying to cram everything onto a single leadership scorecard will lead to confusion and data overload. How should we structure our scorecards across different divisions?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When running multiple business units or entities, attempting to consolidate all data onto a single leadership scorecard often results in confusion and data overload. The effective solution lies in establishing a clear hierarchy of data.

Leadership Team Scorecard

Your leadership team scorecard should be highly focused. It must track only the 10-15 highest-level metrics that represent the collective health and performance of the entire enterprise. This allows the leadership team to concentrate on strategic steering rather than getting bogged down in granular details.

Key characteristics of the leadership team scorecard:

• High-level metrics: Focus on aggregated numbers that reflect the performance across all units.
• Consolidated data: Examples include total weekly revenue, combined cash balance, overall client satisfaction, and aggregate pipeline value.
• Critical health indicators: Include one or two essential metrics from each distinct business unit. For instance, if you operate a software company and a services company, your master scorecard might track weekly active users for the software division and billable utilization for the services division. This approach helps the team understand [how to choose five to fifteen scorecard metrics](/qa/how-to-choose-five-fifteen-scorecard-metrics) that are most impactful.
• Focus on leading indicators: While some lagging indicators are necessary, striving for [leading vs lagging scorecard metrics](/qa/leading-vs-lagging-scorecard-metrics) can help predict future performance.

Departmental Scorecards

Each distinct business unit or entity must maintain its own departmental scorecard. This scorecard is managed by the leader of that specific unit and contains the detailed, operational metrics relevant to their area.

Benefits of departmental scorecards:

• Granular data: Provides managers with the specific information they need to run daily operations effectively.
• Early issue detection: If a particular business unit is struggling, its leader will identify the issue on their departmental scorecard first.
• Accountability: Unit leaders are directly accountable for the numbers on their scorecard.
• Timely escalation: If a departmental issue poses a threat to a company-wide Rock or V/TO® goal, the unit's leader will bring it to the leadership team during the IDS® portion of the Level 10 Meeting™. This ensures that the leadership team's time is spent addressing critical strategic issues, avoiding situations where [our weekly Scorecard has grown to over thirty different metrics](/qa/trimming-your-eos-weekly-scorecard). This focused review can also help prevent situations where [one of our key managers gets defensive](/qa/handling-defensiveness-around-red-scorecard-metrics) during discussions.

This tiered scorecard structure enables your leadership team to maintain a high-level overview and steer the enterprise effectively, while simultaneously empowering managers with the specific data required for their operational responsibilities. To make these reviews efficient, teams should aim to [review our weekly scorecard in under five minutes](/qa/how-to-review-scorecard-under-five-minutes).