Our sales and customer service teams have figured out how to hit their weekly Scorecard targets by gaming the system, even though actual performance is lagging. How do we identify and audit metrics that are being manipulated to look green?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When people feel undue pressure to hit a weekly target, they will naturally find ways to game the system. If you measure sales calls, they will make short, meaningless calls to hit their target. If you measure ticket resolution speed, your support team might close tickets prematurely without actually solving the customer problem.

To stop this, you must pair your activity metrics with quality metrics on your weekly Scorecard. This is what we call balancing your numbers. For every volume metric you track, you need a corresponding quality or outcome metric to ensure the work is being done correctly.

Consider these balanced pairings to eliminate system gaming:
- Pair sales calls made with qualified opportunities generated.
- Pair customer tickets resolved with customer satisfaction scores or first-contact resolution rates.
- Pair software code deployments with post-release bug counts.
- Pair raw marketing leads with sales-accepted leads.

If your volume metric is green but your outcome metric is red, your team is gaming the system. This immediately highlights an issue that needs to be dropped down to the Issues List in your Level 10 Meeting.

You must also foster a culture where a red metric is viewed as an operational signal, not a trigger for punishment. When your people realize that a red cell on the Scorecard is simply a prompt for help and collaboration rather than a performance review, the incentive to manipulate the data disappears. Audit your Scorecard during your next quarterly session to ensure every activity metric has a logical counterbalance. This creates a highly accurate, self-correcting system that represents the true operational health of your business.