Conflicting KPIs: I Am Measured on This Number

Last issue ended on what this loop costs, and who ends up carrying that cost when the fix still depends on one person.

The clearest answer I have comes from a dual-sourcing move that sat for months. Nobody in it was careless. Nobody was dragging their feet. The cost still landed in five different places, and none of those places belonged to the person holding the move.

This issue stays on the loop: your own capacity, your team's systems and your strategy either hold each other up or pull each other down. Last issue was about why a fix to one of them comes undone. This one is about the price of a loop that only closes through you.

Every move in the plan stays parked until you are the one who starts it.

A bonus tied to one number

We were bringing on a second source for a core product. The reasons were sound and nobody argued with them. A second source meant options. It meant we could ramp inventory when demand jumped, cover the peaks and valleys in production, and get access to other trade agreements.

The plan on the table was to build the full inventory cushion at the new vendor before moving any volume over. Nothing would switch until the whole cushion existed. On paper, that reads as the careful option. Every unit the new vendor shipped would sit in reserve until the reserve was complete, and only then would the first order go their way.

So nothing switched. It sat for months.

Running both sources in parallel was available the entire time. Keep the incumbent at full volume, let the new source ramp up, carry more stock than normal during the overlap. The product was core. It was not going to stop selling. The extra exposure was survivable, and it was temporary.

The constraint was not operational. Someone was measured on an inventory number, and carrying the extra stock would move that number the wrong way through no decision of their own. Nobody had ever told them the number could be adjusted.

The question put to me was this:

"What's gonna happen to my year-end bonus? I am measured on this number."

So they held, and they were right to. They were working correctly against the only rule anyone had written down. Holding was the one defensible position they had.

Months on a single source

Cost in a supply chain almost never falls in one place. It spreads across the total cost of ownership, and this move touched all of it.

Without a second source, ramping inventory when demand moves takes longer than it should. That costs sales. It costs service, the kind customers remember when they place the next order.

With one source, there is nothing to negotiate with on price, so margin stays wherever the incumbent puts it.

All of it lands in working capital, which is where an operation actually breathes. Stock that cannot move when you need it, a price you cannot push on, and service you have to recover from all show up there eventually.

Then there is the cost that shows up on no report at all. A field sales force sells what it believes the operation can deliver. When supply sits on one source, the people closing business carry a quiet doubt into every conversation. They commit a little less. They promise a little less. Nobody ever sees the deals that doubt cost.

Sales. Service. Margin. Working capital. The confidence of the people winning the business. Five places, all of them real, every month the plan stayed parked.

Who carried the wait

Look at where those costs sat. Sales and service on the commercial side. Margin in finance. Working capital on the balance sheet. Field confidence nowhere anyone could measure it.

None of them sat on the scorecard of the person holding the move. The only number in the conversation tied to a person was the one that said hold.

The person who owned the move did not own the cost. The people who owned pieces of the cost did not own the move. That split is the whole problem, and no amount of goodwill on either side closes it, because nobody on either side has the authority to change the measure.

That is how a cost spread across five places behaves. It sits in nobody's number, so nobody is paid to resolve it. It waits for whoever has the standing to change the rule that holds it in place.

Here, that was me. The fix was one sentence: the number can be adjusted before it goes in for year-end payout.

I said it. Then it was adjusted. The parallel run started, and the move went ahead.

The fix was one sentence. It still had to come from me.

The C-suite's share

LHH's View from the C-Suite survey of 2,675 C-suite executives in 10 countries, released in February 2025, found leadership burnout had risen to 56%, up from 52% in 2023.

To me that number is dependency, landing on a person. When moves wait on one person's say-so, that person carries every wait as their own. Some of what gets called burnout is the operation's unresolved cost, collected in the one place it can be released.

That reading is mine, not LHH's. Their survey measures how executives feel. It does not measure why.

When the cost of all this finally gets counted, it tends to get counted as the leader's: the hours, the strain, the evenings spent unsticking things. That cost is real, and it is the smaller number. The larger one is everything the operation gives up while it waits for that person to get around to it.

The lock in the loop

Dual sourcing was a strategy move. The bonus metric was a team rule. The strategy waited on the team rule, and the team rule waited on the one person who could say it was allowed to bend. The loop closed, but only through me.

Measures get designed one team at a time, and each one makes sense where it sits. Strategic moves cross teams. So almost any move worth making runs into somebody's number on the way through, and the person who owns that number does exactly what the person in my scene did. They protect the only thing they are paid to protect. Nobody wrote a rule for what happens when a strategy needs that number to move for a while, so the decision floats upward until it finds someone senior enough to make it.

The obvious response to a stalled move is pressure. Put a deadline on the transition, escalate it, ask in every review why it is late. None of that touches the metric. Holding stays the rational choice, so the person holds harder and now feels watched while doing it.

The response I used works once. I released the number. But if every release takes a sentence from me, the next move that runs into a metric waits for the next sentence. The loop still runs through one person. It just runs through me a little more smoothly.

One move this week

Pick one move in your plan that is waiting. Ask whoever is holding it which number they are measured on that the move would push the wrong way.

If there is one, decide whether it can be adjusted. Then write the answer down: what can move, by how much, from what date, and under what condition. Put it where the next person holding a move like this will find it before they need to ask.

For the dual-sourcing move, we made the adjustment on receipts. Everything that came in from the new source was excluded from the year-end inventory calculation. We could just as easily have excluded the dual-sourced items outright; we knew exactly which ones they were. Written down as a standing rule, either one is a single line. It would have turned a question only I could answer into a rule anyone could apply.

Written down, the next release does not need you.

Priced around you

A single source for a core product is a competitive disadvantage that nobody chose. It was chosen for them by a number.

Anyone who ever prices this operation pays for what runs without you and discounts what does not. An operation whose moves wait for one person to say a number can bend gets priced around that person.

A buyer never needs to hear about the bonus metric to see the effect. They see it in how long moves take to start, in plans that are always about to happen, and in how often the answer to "when" turns out to be a name.

Dependency is a discount.

Next issue: why the person closest to a lock like this is usually the last one who can see it.

Oscar

Want to see which moves in your plan are waiting on a number only you can bend? The Resilience Engine Maturity Assessment maps it: myresilienceengine.com/maturity-assessment