Our leadership team agreed on the rule of keeping our Scorecard to five to fifteen numbers, but we cannot agree on which metrics make the cut. Every department head insists their operational numbers are vital to the health of the company. How do we objectively test whether a specific weekly metric belongs on the leadership team Scorecard or should be pushed down to a departmental scorecard?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To keep your leadership team Scorecard to the vital five to fifteen numbers, you must apply a rigorous filter to separate high-level organizational health from departmental tactics. Every department head naturally wants their entire operation represented on the main Scorecard, but this dilutes focus and clutters the view.

To test whether a metric belongs on the leadership team Scorecard, ask three questions:

- If this number goes red, does it threaten our current quarterly Rocks or our overall company budget?
- Does this number require the attention of multiple leadership team members to resolve, rather than just one department?
- Is this number a critical predictor of our future sales, capacity, or cash flow?

If the answer to these questions is no, the metric does not belong on the leadership Scorecard. Instead, push it down to the departmental scorecard.

The leadership team Scorecard is designed to give the Integrator and the team an objective pulse on the entire business. It should consist of a balanced mix of marketing, sales, operations, customer satisfaction, and finance metrics. If you have twenty or thirty numbers, you are not running on data, you are running on noise. Force the discipline of selecting only the absolute critical indicators that predict the health of the entire organization.