We suspect some of our managers are structuring their weekly Scorecard targets and activities so they always look good, even when overall performance is flat. How do we identify and stop people from gaming their weekly metrics?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When people feel threatened by a red metric, their natural survival instinct is to game the system. They do this by tracking activities that are easy to manipulate rather than activities that drive actual business outcomes. For example, a sales rep might log dozens of low-quality automated emails just to hit their outreach target, even though those emails yield zero sales appointments.

To spot and stop this behavior, you must look closely at the relationship between your leading activity metrics and your lagging results. If your weekly activity numbers are consistently green but your quarterly results are flat or falling, your team is gaming the metrics. They are focusing on the quantity of the activity rather than the quality of the execution.

You must reset your Scorecard by ensuring every activity-based metric has a strict quality control definition. For example, instead of tracking raw outbound calls, track booked discovery calls that meet your ideal client profile. If your marketing seat is tracking website traffic, change that metric to qualified leads generated.

During your quarterly V/TO review, run a brutal assessment of your metrics. Ask your leadership team if the green numbers are actually producing the expected business results. If they are not, IDS the metric. Redefine the target or replace the metric entirely with one that cannot be easily manipulated. Make it clear that hitting a target through administrative loopholes is a failure of GWC for that seat. True accountability means running on honest data, not vanity metrics designed to hide poor performance.