The Problem With Hitting Your Numbers

How Are You Measuring Success, and What Is It Costing You?

Several years ago I was leading a team, and like any team, we had a set of metrics we were accountable for hitting.

Going into the year, it was widely understood - quietly, in the way these things usually are - that the objectives were unrealistic. The targets had been set based on an overall profitability goal and cascaded down from there through a series of math that made sense on paper and less sense in the real world. We committed to doing whatever we could to close the gap.

Midway through the year, my peers and I were having a frank conversation with our manager about the numbers. It was clear we weren't going to come close. The target was what it was, but we'd likely still hit the underlying profit objective, just not the way the metric had been structured. We were told to keep pushing toward the number but not to lose sleep over it, and to shift some focus toward longer-term priorities.

That felt like permission. And if I'm being honest, I probably leaned into it more than I should have.

The freedom to experiment was real and energizing - but looking back, I think I used the latitude as a reason to dial back the urgency on the core targets more than the situation actually called for. The longer-term work mattered. It just wasn't a substitute for staying disciplined on the fundamentals.

Then the year-end performance reviews arrived.

No grace for the missed target. The context of the conversation we'd had, the things we'd built toward the future, none of it showed up in the evaluation. What showed up was the number. And the number was short.

I learned two things from that experience. The first was about how organizations communicate expectations, and how easy it is for a mid-year conversation to be interpreted very differently by the people on either side of it. The second was about my own accountability. A good leader finds a way to do both: maintain discipline on what's required today while creating space for what matters tomorrow. I hadn't quite figured out how to hold those two things at once yet.

That tension is still one of the most interesting problems in leadership.

Golden Handcuffs

There's a concept called Goodhart's Law that names this dynamic precisely: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The nail factory version of this is almost too perfect. A factory decides to measure productivity by the number of nails produced. Workers optimize, and start producing millions of tiny, useless pins. Management switches the metric to total weight of nails produced. Workers pivot to making a single enormous nail.

In both cases, the target was hit. The goal - making useful nails - was completely undermined.

It's almost funny until you realize how often this plays out at scale in the real world.

A study published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics surveyed more than 400 CFOs and senior executives at major U.S. companies about their decision-making around quarterly earnings targets. The results were striking: 78% said they would sacrifice long-term economic value to keep short-term earnings smooth and predictable. 80% said they would cut spending on R&D, marketing, and hiring if they were at risk of missing a quarterly target. And 55% said they would delay or reject a new project with a guaranteed positive return if starting it meant missing the current quarter's number.

These aren't people who are bad at math. They're people who are trapped by the incentive structure around them. Miss the quarterly target by a penny and the stock takes a hit. Signal a lack of control to the board and your job is at risk. The metric stops being a way of measuring something meaningful and becomes the only thing that matters, regardless of what it's actually measuring, it becomes your golden handcuffs.

Accidentally Discovering “The Little Blue Pill”

There’s another big risk to over-indexing on a single metric: you also lose the capacity for serendipity.

Pfizer's scientists were originally trying to develop a treatment for cardiovascular conditions: high blood pressure, chest pain. The trials weren't going well. The drug wasn't doing what they'd hoped for the heart.

Then the nurses asked the male trial participants to return their unused pills.

Many of them refused.

That refusal -  that unusual, unexpected human behaviour - prompted a different question. And the answer to that question became Viagra. One of the most commercially successful pharmaceutical products in history, discovered because someone paid attention to something that wasn't on the original measurement sheet.

If the team had been evaluated only on the original cardiovascular metric, the finding gets filed away. Or dismissed. Or never surfaced at all because nobody had permission to be curious about anything outside the designated objective.

Distorting Value

In my own story, the period where I felt I had latitude to experiment - where the short-term target pressure had been temporarily lifted - was when I was doing some of my most interesting work with the team. We were trying things. Building toward something. The creativity was real.

The moment I was told to tighten up and be more consistent with the standard approach, that energy quietly disappeared. Not because anyone banned creativity. Just because the metric made clear what actually mattered.

That's the invisible cost that never shows up in a performance review.

Measurement is powerful. But the way we measure can quietly distort what we actually value. A marketing manager can develop the most brilliant campaign ever created and only claim a fraction of the credit, because brand equity is hard to quantify. Meanwhile a procurement manager can take full credit for every penny saved while never being held accountable for the supplier relationships damaged, the quality compromised, or the long-term value quietly eroded by a relentless cost-cutting mandate.

The metric rewarded the wrong thing. And nobody built a way to catch it.

So what can you actually do about this?

Find something worth measuring that nobody else is measuring.
The most defensible competitive advantage is often built in the space that your competitors aren't tracking. If everyone in your industry is optimizing for the same three metrics, the opportunity lives somewhere else. Define it. Own it. Get brilliant at it.

Separate the scorecard from the story.
Numbers tell you what happened. They rarely tell you why, or what it means for what comes next. Build in the discipline to have the conversation behind the metric: what drove it, what it's missing, what it might be incentivizing that you didn't intend.

Build in explicit permission to experiment.
If every resource, every conversation, and every review is pointed at the quarterly number, experimentation gets quietly defunded. Protect a small but real allocation - of time, budget, or attention - that is specifically not tied to the existing metrics. That's where the Viagras get discovered.

Hold the metric and the goal separately.
The metric is supposed to serve the goal, not replace it. When a number starts to feel more important than the thing it was designed to measure, that's the signal to step back and ask whether the measurement is still pointing in the right direction.

Make it Worth Building

The nails still need to be useful.

That's the whole point of measurement — to help you build something worth building, in a direction worth going. When the metric loses sight of that, it doesn't just stop being useful. It actively pulls you the wrong way, quietly and consistently, until the damage is significant enough that someone finally stops to ask how you got here.

The answer, usually, is one reasonable-seeming measurement decision at a time.

Audit your metrics like they're working against you. Because sometimes they are.