When Numbers Work Against You
Good leaders give their teams clear goals. And what’s clearer than a number? The problem is that a number does help the team focus, but not necessarily on the right things. If you want the number to stay, it can’t travel alone.
As part of next year’s planning, I’m helping many of my clients focus on what really matters. The companies who are really into it are willing to work very hard to define clear numeric goals. And then they want my advice on which number should rule them all. What the north star should be.
I don’t like north stars.
The intention is good — to create extreme clarity and focus. And it works, just not the way you think.
A clear number indeed helps people focus, but it also blinds them. With a number in front of them, people will do things that don’t serve the real goal just to reach the number, and most of the time they do it unknowingly. It’s human nature.
I’ve seen this happening time and again, but it’s easier to explain it with an example from a different domain.
I recently learned that a few years ago the Ministry of Education wanted to improve the high school education. To measure progress, they set their goal as an increase in the share of high-school students who qualify for the matriculation certificate (the exams behind the high-school diploma). When they checked later on they saw that the share went up. Theoretically, they nailed it. But when they dug deeper, they saw that the high school education did not improve at all. People saw the numeric goal and worked for it. Schools moved weak students out before their final year, so they were never counted, and moved others to easier exam levels. Nobody set out to hurt anyone. The people doing it knew what education is for, and the number still pulled them off it. That is obviously not what anyone meant.
You might argue that the metrics needed tweaking and that would have fixed it. I’ve seen it happening with teams who live by numbers, and with companies who took very careful consideration in choosing the right goals. It’s not the right solution.
With a number in front of them, people can work hard, make the number move, and take the company further from the change it wanted, without ever deciding to.
They try so hard
The world we work in is complicated, so we try to represent it clearly by numbers. Numbers are simple, well defined, easy to understand, and give a feeling of clarity. But numbers are only a proxy.
Unfortunately, most people don’t remember that, and especially when we ask them to do things, they want very concrete and specific guidelines. Numbers seem to be the perfect answer, but they work so well that they make the context behind the numbers slowly fade and cause people to make the wrong decisions.
The paradox is that the people most likely to drift this way are the ones who most want to succeed. They were given a goal, so they work hard to meet it. Someone who doesn’t really strive for it won’t get very far in any direction, but a determined person can go a long way toward the number, including away from what it was meant to show.
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Of course, someone could say the best people challenge the goal rather than follow it blindly. That’s true, but those people are rare. And as the organization grows, which is usually when numbers start being used more strictly, expecting everyone to question everything until they understand what wasn’t said is no longer realistic, or productive.
There’s no beating this, because it’s human nature. But there are things you can do to help people stay on the right track and not just the one you marked.
The real north star
If numbers are just a proxy for the real goal, you want to make sure the real goal is clearly articulated and carried along the way. That’s the real north star. But since no dashboard can show the change you want to see in the world without numbers, the way to carry it forward is by words.
Talk about the goal, mention it all the time, repeat it until everyone echoes it back to you. That’s the only way to ensure that when they make decisions when you are not there, the real goal is in front of them and not just the number.
Some people will still struggle, because they want something more concrete.
When I work on this with leadership teams, we break the goal down, not into more numbers, but into the challenges underneath it, the things we need to crack or win.
For example, if your goal is to establish presence in the US market, you can break it down by the customer journey: how do people hear about you, what you are offering them, how do you convince them to choose you. Each such challenge can also be broken down further into smaller ones, but it’s not the numbers that matter, it’s the essence.
With that picture above the number, people can move up and down, from the change the company wants, to the challenge their team owns, to the work in front of them. That is a very different starting point from “here’s the metric, go improve it.”
Your safety net
Repeating the real goal and breaking it down goes a long way, but numbers are still important and we don’t want to lose their strength. To avoid the drift, you can use numeric goals but with a safety mechanism: a way to see that we are not fooling ourselves.
The way to do it is, for each goal, to say out loud in advance what it must not break. So a numeric goal doesn’t come on its own, but rather something like “increase conversion without reducing throughput and quality”. That combination then becomes what you look at when you check the numbers, and I recommend building your dashboards accordingly.
Numbers are a strong but risky tool. To get all the benefit without the risk, make sure they don’t blur people’s judgement as to what matters. Ask what’s the right thing to do, and not just what will move the needle.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on November 12, 2026.
