Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Numerical Goals Don’t Deliver Success

Q.  Recently I went to a company I hadn’t visited for over a year. It was a quiet week, and people were allowed to go home early that day. I inquired about people I’d known there. Some had been fired (didn’t hit their numbers), others laid off; others quit. The turnover was 96%. Did management care only about the numbers now?

A. There are executives who don’t know how to lead people or manage organizations. Unfortunately, they learned to buy into a set of numbers instead of a purpose. They assumed that meeting targets equated to success.

People working IN the system also learned to drive toward numbers and quotas at any cost. It only proves the system trained them well. If you have spent years rewarding a target and punishing whoever misses it, of course your people know the target matters. Maybe nothing else matters: delivering quality to customers; a collaborative workplace; creative ideas leading to innovation and survival. 

The focus and time spent on forecasts, budgets, numbers, quotas, incentives, and targets all lead to the waste and complexity that grows exponentially. That myopic focus also reflects the lack of leadership and management knowledge to improve and grow a business. That’s true across any sector: corporate, non- profits, healthcare, education, government or the military. 

Are measures important? Of course. Some are. But few are. And measures are important if they start with a strategic question that’s tied to customers. Those questions are inspiring when people want to learn. Targets, quotas, and stretch goals that are given mean management doesn’t understand the system and what the system can produce. 

Leaders Clarify 

An executive team running a multi-million-dollar organization can articulate clearly the purpose and direction of the organization, identify the markets it serves, what it stands for, and how to measure its success with a few metrics. The rest is not a high priority. Some other measures are helpful, but don’t define the success of the organization

Management fads and “best practices” that managers adopt come from somewhere else too. Someone read a book, sat through a conference, or watched a competitor adopt a framework, and brought it back to the team dressed up as strategy. Each program arrives with a new language and a new slide deck, and each one fades a year or month later when the next one shows up. 

None of them were wrong on their own. The problem is that they got adopted without anyone asking whether they fit your company, your people, or the actual problem you were trying to solve. That is where the inauthenticity comes from. People can feel when language is borrowed instead of believed. 

A profit number and a set of quarterly goals are outcomes, not an aim or compelling purpose that will help the organization be sustainable. When profit and too many other metrics becomes the only thing leadership talks about, people learn to manage the number instead of the business. They hit targets by cutting corners, delaying decisions, or gaming a metric, because the system never gave them anything larger to aim for. 

Numbers without a purpose behind them will always get gamed, because a number is easy to fake and a purpose is not. Ask anyone on the front line and they can tell you exactly which numbers get massaged at the end of a quarter, and they can also tell you that leadership already knows it (but may ignore it.) 

The lack of direction is not separate from the fads and the numbers. When there is no clear aim, any program looks like progress, and any number looks like proof. Leaders reach for the next best practice because it feels like doing something, and employees hold onto the numbers because the numbers are the only clarity anyone has ever given them. A company without a real aim will always have a favorite fad, because something must fill the silence where direction should be. 

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

What People Trust 

Changing this does not start with taking away the numbers people already trust. It starts with giving them something bigger to trust instead. Name a real aim for the company, something beyond profit, tied to the customer or the contribution you want to make. Test every practice already running in your organization against that aim. Keep what serves it. Remove what only sounds good in a meeting. As you do that, you’ll remove the waste. 

Bring the people who bought into the old numbers into the work of building the new aim. They are not the obstacle here; they are the asset. People who commit that fully to a number will commit even harder to a purpose worth caring about, once you give them one and show them through your own decisions, not just your words, that you mean it.

Direction cannot be announced once and expected to hold. It must survive the next hard quarter, the next tempting shortcut, the next fad someone brings back from a conference. That is the real test of whether an aim is authentic or just another program. Give your people something true to build toward, and the numbers will finally mean something again.