Give a Team the Wrong Metric and They'll Hit It Perfectly

Give a team the wrong metric and they'll hit it perfectly — right off a cliff.

Early in my career I ran software-services and support teams for Fortune 500 clients. Like everyone, I started by measuring the obvious things: tickets closed, calls handled, average handle time. The numbers looked great. The clients were quietly getting frustrated.

Here's what I'd missed. “Tickets closed” rewards closing tickets — not solving problems. So a ticket gets closed fast, the customer's issue isn't actually fixed, and they open a new one. The dashboard shows productivity going up while the customer experience goes down. The metric was working exactly as designed; it was just measuring the wrong thing.

The fix wasn't a better dashboard. It was changing what we counted. We shifted from activity metrics to outcome metrics — turnaround time to genuine resolution, and whether the same issue came back. The moment the team's scorecard rewarded solving over closing, behaviour changed on its own. Retention on those accounts climbed past 85%.

A few things that experience taught me about measuring people:

1. People optimise for exactly what you measure — not what you want. If the metric and the goal aren't the same thing, the metric wins. Every time. So the hard work isn't collecting data; it's making sure the number you reward is a true proxy for the outcome you actually care about.

2. A good metric survives being gamed. Ask of any KPI: “if someone maximised only this, would the customer be better off?” If the answer is no, you've built a trap for your own team.

3. What you celebrate teaches faster than what you say. A team learns its real priorities from what gets rewarded in the numbers, not from the values on the wall.

The most expensive mistake in management isn't failing to hit a target. It's hitting the wrong one — efficiently, quarter after quarter, while the thing that actually matters quietly erodes.

What's a metric you've seen a team hit perfectly while missing the point entirely?