Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

Every day, at almost every company, strategy is being hijacked by numbers. Because strategy is abstract, employees often mentally replace it with the hard metrics meant to assess whether the organization is succeeding at it. This tendency is called surrogation, and it destroys a lot of value. Take Wells Fargo. Executives there decided to track cross-sales to customers to measure performance on the bank’s strategy of building long-term customer relationships. The focus on cross-selling goals led employees to open 3.5 million accounts without customer consent, which, with brutal irony, severely damaged the long-term relationships the bank sought.

Though it’s easy to fall into the surrogation snare, firms can take steps to avoid it. For instance, they can involve the people who’ll implement a strategy in its formulation, so they’ll be more likely to grasp it and less likely to replace it with a metric. Tying financial incentives to a metric is usually a mistake: It only increases the focus on the numbers. Using multiple yardsticks is very helpful, however; that highlights the fact that no single metric captures the strategy and makes people less apt to surrogate.