Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and golajiving. This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul Fello Aledo.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode seven point thirty four. Today we're talking about dashboards, those beautiful, color coded, number filled screens that sit at the center of most leadership decisions today, green lights, upward arrows, percentages that look great in a Monday morning meeting, and the uncomfortable truth a lot of those dashboards are lying to you, not on purpose. Nobody's sitting in a back
room cooking the numbers. But the data you're seeing, the way it's presented, the metrics that got chosen, the things that didn't make the cut, all of it is shaping how you see your organization and sometimes what it's showing you in what's actually happening, are two very different things. Let me give you a simple example. A leader I know was proud of his team's response time metrics. The dashboard showed average response times were down, the numbers looked great.
Leadership was happy, bonuses were being discussed. But when a few customers started leaving. Nobody could figure out why the dashboard said everything was fine. It took one honest conversation with a frontline employee to find out what was happening. Yes, response times were down because the team had learned to close tickets faster, not resolve problems better. The metric was being gamed, not maliciously, just naturally, because people do what
gets measured. The dashboard was telling a true story, it just wasn't telling the whole story. And that's the thing about data. It doesn't lie outright. It just leaves things out, and what gets left out is often the most important stuff. Here's why this happens. When we build dashboards, we measure what's easy to measure. Response times, revenue, units sold, headcount. Those are all real numbers. They're legitimate, but they're also just the surface. They don't capture morale. They don't capture
how close your best people are to quitting. They don't capture whether your customers actually like doing business with you or whether they're just stuck with you for now. The things that really predict where your organization is going, those are often harder to quantify, and because they're harder, they get left off the dashboard entirely. So what does that mean for you as a leader. It means your dashboard should be a starting point for a conversation, not an
ending point. When the numbers look good, that's your cue to ask why when they look bad, same thing. The number tells you something happened, it doesn't tell you what's actually going on beneath the surface. The best leaders i've seen use data the way a doctor uses a thermometer. A fever tells you something's wrong, it doesn't tell you what's wrong. A good doctor doesn't just treat the fever. They go looking for the cause. Your metrics should work
the same way. There's another problem worth naming here, and it's a cultural one, and a lot of organizations dashboards become political. People know what numbers leadership is watching, and they focus their energy on those numbers, whether that's the right use of their energy or not. When that happens, you stop getting an accurate picture of reality. You get a picture of what people think you want to see. So if you've created an environment where bad news is unwelcome,
your dashboard will reflect that. People will find ways, sometimes very creative ways to make the numbers look acceptable. And you'll be making decisions based on a version of reality that doesn't quite exist. The fix isn't complicated, but it takes courage. You have to make it safe to bring you the real picture. You have to be the kind of leader who doesn't shoot the messenger, who thanks people for hard conversations, who says I'd rather know now than later.
And you have to get off the dashboard and into the room. Sometimes walk the floor, have lunch with someone who's close to the customer. Ask your frontline people what's actually happening. No filter, no polish, just the truth. Numbers can hide things people usually can't not if you give them the space to be honest. So here are three things you can do this week. First, pick one metric on your dashboard that your team has control over and ask someone close to the work what they think is
really driving that number. You might be surprised by that answer. Second, look for a number that's missing. What important thing in your organization are you not measuring? Ask yourself why and whether that needs to change. And Third, create a moment this week where someone on your team can tell you something uncomfortable without consequences. You don't have to announce it
as a policy, just be receptive when it happens. Dashboards are tools, good ones, but a tool is only as useful as the person using it, and the best leaders know that data is just one input, not the whole picture. So the next time you're sitting in front of your dashboard and everything looks fine, let that be the moment you lean forward and ask, what's this not showing me? That question alone will make you a better leader than
a thousand perfect metrics ever could. And if you want more free leadership resources, head over to Paulfalovalito dot com and click on free Stuff. I have over twenty five free leadership documents that you can download and start using today. This has been the seven minute leadership podcast and I thank you for listening.
For more Paul Fello Alito podcasts, visit Paulfellowalito dot com