Several of our department heads keep private, highly detailed offline spreadsheets to track their operations, but they only share high-level, sanitized summaries on our official weekly Scorecard. How do we stop this data hoarding and bring transparency to our numbers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Data hoarding is a symptom of low trust or fear of conflict within a leadership team. When managers keep private spreadsheets, they are usually trying to protect themselves from scrutiny or control the narrative around their department's performance.

To break this habit, you must reinforce the core EOS principle: run the business on a single source of truth. Your weekly Scorecard must be the definitive dashboard for the company's health.

Explain to your department heads that their offline spreadsheets are actually great tools for managing their departmental L10 meetings. However, the leadership team needs the upstream leading indicators on the main Scorecard to predict company-wide issues.

If a manager is hiding detailed data, push the issue to your Level 10 Meeting and IDS it. Ask why they feel the need to keep the data private.

By bringing this issue into the open, you can identify if your target metrics are poorly defined or if there is a fear of repercussions for missing targets. Resolve the underlying trust issue, and then integrate those critical upstream metrics directly into your cascading scorecards so everyone has total visibility.