What You Measure Is What You Get
As a musician, I learned early that people will play whatever sheet of music you put in front of them. It doesn't matter if the arrangement is wrong for the room, or if the tempo is off, or if you'd get a better result from an entirely different song. If it's on the stand, that's what gets played. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how that same dynamic plays out in business, and what I've come to believe is that most companies build their performance systems around exactly this problem without ever recognizing it.
The metrics you choose are the sheet music. Whatever you put on the stand is what your team will play to.
This sounds obvious until you examine what most organizations are actually measuring. Activity dominates: calls placed, emails sent, tickets closed, content published, tasks completed. These are the things that are easiest to count, easiest to report, and easiest to hit. They also carry a fundamental flaw, which is that achieving all of them simultaneously can still leave the business falling short of what it actually needs. A content writer with a northstar KPI of words published per week will hit that number. She'll hit it reliably, and she'll feel good about it. If your business depends on content converting readers into pipeline, though, word count is the wrong song entirely. What you need to know is whether the content is generating leads. Honestly, if one piece brought in a six-figure opportunity, I'd consider that a better week than ten pieces that brought in nothing, regardless of how many words it took to do it.
The distinction matters because it's not really about the metric itself. It's about what the metric signals. Activity metrics signal effort. Outcome metrics signal results. Revenue generated, customers retained, product shipped and functioning in the hands of actual users — these are the numbers that reveal whether a company is winning, and they're considerably harder to obscure with a good explanation. You either converted or you didn't. The customer either stayed or she didn't.
What tends to happen over time, and I've watched this pattern repeat across organizations of very different sizes, is that metrics drift toward comfort. When a number starts creating real pressure, the instinct is to contextualize it, to note the surrounding circumstances, to argue that it's technically trending in the right direction given the quarter. The dashboard grows more elaborate, the explanations multiply, and somewhere in that softening, the original purpose of the metric gets quietly abandoned. You end up with a system that produces good-looking reports and poor results.
The companies that actually execute well tend to have fewer metrics than you'd expect, and those metrics are owned completely by someone who cannot explain them away. Two or three numbers per function, reviewed without ceremony every week. That simplicity isn't a sign of unsophistication. It's evidence that someone made a hard decision about what actually matters and refused to dilute it.
The sheet music shapes the performance. Get it wrong and you'll have a very busy, very committed team playing the wrong song beautifully.
