When the Numbers Lie

Open the quarterly dashboard at almost any large company and you’ll see green lights everywhere: tickets closed ahead of schedule, calls answered in under thirty seconds, 120 percent of the sales target achieved. On paper it all looks beautiful—until you talk to the people who live behind the numbers. They describe broken processes rushed through to meet a deadline, customers hastily shuffled between departments so the timer stops, and a sales pipeline stuffed with prospects who will never convert.

No case illustrates the gap between counted success and actual success more starkly than the Wells Fargo cross‑selling scandal. From 2011 to 2016, thousands of frontline employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts in customers’ names. It wasn’t a rogue scheme dreamed up in a back room. It was the predictable outcome of a single KPI—“new products per customer”—that governed bonuses, promotions, and even continued employment.

The metric did exactly what it was designed to do: drive up account‑opening. But it also drove overdraft fees on ghost accounts, damaged credit scores, and a collapse of public trust that hauled executives before Congress and cost billions in fines.

That is the quiet rot of modern leadership: outsourcing judgment to metrics never meant to bear the weight of comprehensive meaning. Numbers can track activity, but they cannot tell us whether the activity is good, useful, or ethical. When leaders forget that distinction—or hide behind it—the organization begins rewarding signals instead of substance. Metrics become the work.

This essay explores how that happens, what it costs, and how ethically grounded leadership can keep numbers in their proper place—as instruments of insight, not engines of delusion.

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The Metric Mirage

Metrics earn their keep only when they leave room for the uncountable habits that actually create value—and when the person reading the number has lived close enough to the work to know what a healthy pattern looks like. A time‑to‑resolution target is harmless in the hands of a support lead who has fixed tickets herself; she can tell the difference between a tough case and a lazy transfer. Hand that same metric to someone who has never debugged an integration and it mutates into a stopwatch. The clock starts to matter more than the cure.

That slippage explains why single‑number dashboards so often wither in specialized teams. Give a non‑technical manager a squad of data scientists, data engineers, and developers, then ask him to steer by story‑point velocity or pull‑requests merged. He will see movement—sometimes even acceleration—without any clue whether the code is elegant or the model is sound. The team, sensing the gap, optimizes for whatever moves the dial: verbose commits, inconsequential tickets, algorithm tweaks that boost an internal metric while degrading real‑world accuracy.

The illusion deepens because numbers feel clean. They promise objectivity, but each carries an invisible asterisk: context required. Lines‑of‑code counts punish the developer who replaces two hundred brittle lines with ten concise ones. Net Promoter Scores soar when surveys reach only happy customers. Average handle time drops when agents bounce callers to the next queue. In every case the metric is technically correct and practically misleading.

None of this means we should abandon measurement. It means measurement must be partnered with judgment. The manager who understands the craft uses the metric like headlights on a foggy road: bright enough to see obstacles, never bright enough to switch off the steering wheel. Stand too far back—delegate discernment to the dashboard—and the metric becomes autopilot on a road it cannot map.

Incentives Gone Sideways

Performance reviews often measure how little trouble an employee causes rather than how much value they create. The engineer who spends a week eliminating an entire class of bugs logs fewer ticket resolutions than the one who patches each occurrence individually—and may therefore look worse on paper.

Because dashboards celebrate visibility, employees soon learn that visibility itself is the currency. Status meetings proliferate, Slack channels ping day and night, and JIRA cards fly back and forth. Calm, sustainable outcomes—simpler workflows, happier clients—rarely light up a chart.

Sales offers a textbook cautionary tale. Tie commission to top‑line revenue alone and the quickest route to quota often runs through creative discounting. Reps slash margins to close deals before quarter‑end, pad orders with products destined for immediate return, or funnel volume into channels that cannibalize future sales. The spreadsheet applauds the “win,” while finance absorbs the write‑offs and customer success inherits clients who wonder why their renewal price doubled.

Call‑center targets follow the same logic in a different register. Average Handle Time promises efficiency, yet the surest way to shrink the number is to get off the phone—by transferring the caller, whipping through a script, or nudging the customer toward self‑service and hoping they give up. Each agent’s dashboard gleams, but queues lengthen, first‑contact resolution plummets, and loyalty erodes in the background hum of frustration.

The culture tilts toward permanent emergency. Heroic all‑nighters are applauded; careful prevention is invisible. A system built to celebrate firefighters quietly erases the incentive to keep the building from burning in the first place.

Why This Happens

Leaders, facing overwhelming complexity, reach for numbers because numbers feel like handles on chaos. Dashboards offer the illusion of control—a comforting picture of progress that fits on a single screen during a flight.

Technology reinforces that instinct. Modern business‑intelligence tools distill oceans of data into colorful widgets, encouraging executives to forget that every datapoint is a compression of human reality.

As organizations scale, abstraction deepens. Decision‑makers grow further removed from the frontline. Numbers stand in for stories, and unless leaders deliberately re‑humanize feedback loops, those abstractions ossify into policy.

The Real Cost

First, the quiet high performers—the ones who erase friction rather than broadcast effort—grow disillusioned when their contributions vanish behind gaudier metrics. Many grow disillusioned and leave, taking deep institutional knowledge with them.

Ethical erosion follows. When pay and promotion hinge on hitting a target detached from reality, employees feel sanctioned—even obligated—to game the target. Small compromises to move the needle often, over time, compound into systemic fraud.

Finally, the organization goes strategically blind. Metrics continue to look healthy right up to the moment a plateauing market, a subtle shift in customer expectations, or a looming compliance risk lurches into crisis.

What Good Looks Like

A healthy metric behaves like a compass: useful for orientation, never to be confused with the terrain. Getting there requires three habits—design, dialogue, and diligence.

Design: begin with the destination, not the data. Before a single KPI is plotted, leaders should articulate the outcome in plain language. We want customers to stay, not just sign. We want code that is robust, not merely released. From that narrative goal, pick indicators that illuminate progress without inviting shortcuts. A good test is the “evil twin” exercise: imagine how someone could hit the target while undermining the mission—then adjust until that shortcut closes.

Dialogue: pair every number with a human story. Dashboards surface questions; people supply meaning. Make it routine to review metrics alongside first‑hand accounts: a frontline demo, a customer recording, a post‑mortem on a near‑miss. The contrast keeps the organization alert to invisible costs. If the chart is green but the stories are red, the metric needs revision—not the story.

Diligence: revisit, retire, replace. Markets shift, products mature, cultures evolve. A KPI that once guided wisely can ossify into busywork. Build a sunset clause into every metric—quarterly or semi‑annual reviews that ask: Is this still steering us toward the outcome, or has it become cargo cult tracking? When the answer is no, move on without nostalgia.

Alongside those habits, watch for early warning signs that measurement is promoting the wrong behavior:

• Projects swell in scope just to harvest more “points” or “hours.”
• Customer sentiment improves on survey scores yet escalations rise offline.
• The same firefighter/hero stories appear week after week, masking recurring fires.
  This rewards crisis management over prevention.
• Teams speak of “feeding the dashboard” rather than serving the user.

Each signal is a prompt to step closer, ask naïve questions, and, if necessary, change the yardstick. Metrics should never outrank judgment; they should sharpen it.

With thoughtful design, constant conversation, and the courage to prune obsolete measures, leaders can keep the ruler honest—and ensure the work stays truer still.

Rethinking the Role of Metrics

The Wells Fargo scandal shows what happens when a dashboard outmuscles discernment, yet its lesson applies far beyond banking. Every field has its ghost accounts—tickets rushed, contracts discounted, calls truncated—whenever numbers outrank nuance. The remedy is not to despise measurement but to restore its humble place in the hierarchy of truth.

A useful metric does three things. It points toward the mission, it provokes conversation, and it preserves humanity. If any one of those threads snaps, the number turns predatory, feeding on the very value it was meant to protect. Leaders who grasp that principle stop asking, “Which KPI will guarantee success?” and start asking, “What quiet harm will this KPI allow—or encourage—if I’m not watching?”

So audit your dashboards. For each glowing widget, trace the consequence chain until you meet a customer, a colleague, a community. Sit with the story. If the story contradicts the graph, believe the story and change the graph. And if you can’t find the story, step closer until you can.

In the end, a metric is a map, not the ground. Maps are indispensable, but no explorer mistakes them for the territory. Value lives in that territory—in conversations, craftsmanship, and choices that refuse the easy path of counting the wrong things. The work of leadership is to ensure we keep venturing out from behind the screen, ruler in hand, eyes on the horizon where data meets duty.

In the end, perhaps we don’t need the eternal quest for better numbers—we need to be leaders that ask better questions.

Key Takeaways

• Mis‑aligned metrics create mirages of success that mask ethical and operational failure.
• Performance systems built on shallow KPIs reward visibility over value and activity over impact.
• Healthy organizations pair quantitative metrics with qualitative judgment, anchoring incentives to real outcomes.
• Numbers should start conversations, not end them—and never replace ethical, human judgment.