Our leadership team still defaults to tracking historical lagging numbers because they are easier to pull from our software. How do we force a shift to activity-based leading indicators that actually give us time to course-correct before the week ends?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Tracking lagging financial numbers on your weekly Scorecard is like driving a car by only looking in the rearview mirror. By the time you see a drop in revenue or gross margin, the damage was done weeks or months ago. To build a highly valuable business, you must force a transition to activity-based leading indicators.

The reason your team defaults to lagging metrics is comfort. It is easy to run a report on invoices sent or deals closed. It is harder to measure the activities that generate those results. To make the shift, you must identify the upstream activities that guarantee downstream success.

For every lagging result you want to achieve, work backward to find the activity that triggers it.

Use this simple framework to convert lagging numbers to leading indicators:
- Instead of tracking closed revenue, track the number of outbound discovery calls completed.
- Instead of tracking customer churn, track the number of weekly proactive check-in calls made.
- Instead of tracking project completion dates, track the weekly milestone completion percentage.

Once you identify these activities, make them the official measurables on your weekly Scorecard. Assign them to specific seats on your Accountability Chart and hold your team accountable to hitting those activity targets every single week. This gives your Integrator and leadership team the ability to spot issues early and adjust course before the lagging results suffer.