From the April 21st, 2026, edition of How Teams Work
Most teams have dashboards.
The problem? Nobody's looking at them.
Nobody agrees on the numbers.
And nobody is sure which ones to trust.
I see (and hear) it all the time. Do any of these sound familiar?
It’s tough to build a culture around data and reporting when this is the experience.
It's rarely one single issue. More often, it’s a combination of patterns that compound.
These are the ones I see most often. Let me know if you recognize your team in any specific scenario.
A lot of teams aren't choosing their metrics. They're being handed them.
An executive or board asks for a number, and the team starts tracking it without ever understanding why it matters, how it connects to the broader business strategy, or how their work contributes to it. The metric and the strategy aren't connected, so teams end up chasing a number that doesn’t align with broader goals.
One common example is when the goal from leadership is to drive higher-quality leads, but marketing is measuring success by MQL volume. Marketing’s strategy is not aligned with organizational goals.
Another example is when a sales team sets average contract value (ACV) growth as its top priority, but reps are measured on deals closed. A rep closes 12 small deals at $5K each. Quota hit. Bonus earned. Meanwhile, the company needed fewer, bigger deals to hit its revenue targets without the overhead of managing 12 low-value accounts. The rep did exactly what they were measured on and worked directly against what the business needed.
Some teams have metrics that are actively at odds with each other. And nobody can explain how the number they're tracking connects to what the company is actually trying to accomplish this quarter.
2. There's no single source of truth
Does this sound familiar? You can't get to a number without jumping into spreadsheets, doing manual calculations, importing, and exporting data.
And when you do get to a number, it often doesn't match what someone else is seeing.
A common example: HubSpot and Salesforce are both tracking attribution, but they produce different numbers.
A sales rep manually set the original source on an opportunity.
"I met them at an event."
Meanwhile, marketing says they first converted by downloading a whitepaper six months ago.
Both are technically true. Neither is agreed upon.
The same problem shows up between sales and finance, where the CRM and the accounting tools never seem to land on the same figure. It doesn't take long before someone quotes a number in a meeting, and someone else says, "I have something different. Where are you getting that?"
Once that happens enough times, nobody trusts any number. And if nobody trusts the numbers, nobody uses them to make decisions.
Teams build the dashboards, feel good about them, and then quietly drift back to doing things the old way.
One of the first things I do when I audit a portal is look at when dashboards were last viewed.
It's not uncommon to find that nobody has viewed them in two weeks or longer. The data is there, but nobody's looking at it.
If the culture gets bad enough, teams may revert all the way back to reporting in spreadsheets. They tried to build the process, but couldn't sustain it, and reverted.
What's missing is a standard set of meetings where the same reports get reviewed every time, by the same people, on a regular cadence.
Without that, dashboards become shelfware.
“Where am I supposed to look?”
If there are 20 different dashboards and nobody knows which ones are the right ones, people aren't going to go looking.
The one place they used to go no longer exists. People end up bookmarking reports on their own computers just to find them again.
If it's hard to find, people won't look for it. Especially not in the middle of a meeting when they need a number fast.
Accessibility isn't just about permissions. It's about making the right reports obvious and easy to find for everyone who needs them.
You can set all the KPIs you want, but the comp plan is the most honest document in the company.
When goals are tied to how people get paid, focus follows. Activity follows. Behavior follows. People naturally orient toward what affects their paycheck, and that's not a flaw. It's just how incentives work.
The problem arises when the comp plan and the stated goals tell two different stories.
The bonus is tied to revenue closed, but leadership says the number one priority is improving lead quality. Or the goal is retention, but nobody's commission changes if a customer churns.
What it sounds like: "We didn't hit the goal, but I still got my bonus because it was tied to something else."
If the incentive structure doesn't reflect the goal, the goal isn't real. And if the goal isn't real, the reporting built around it becomes theater.
If you’re talking about calculated metrics like CAC or MRR, and the team doesn't know how they impact it, what drives it, or why the goal is what it is, it’s like you are speaking a different language to them.
Teams can't rally around something they don't understand.
This gets especially complicated when people move companies or industries. The same metric can be calculated differently depending on the business.
Utilization means something different in one service org versus another.
Cost of acquisition has different inputs at a SaaS company versus a professional services firm.
What this looks like: you explain the goal, someone nods, and when you ask how they'd actually move the number, there's silence.
Education isn't a one-time event. It needs to happen whenever the strategy changes or someone new joins the team.
Most meetings don't start with a scorecard. They just start.
Someone brings up a concern, another person shares an update, and the conversation meanders from topic to topic without ever grounding in what the numbers actually say. By the end, decisions get made based on whoever spoke most confidently, not what the data showed.
You hear it in how strategy conversations open: "I think we should..." or "I believe the problem is..." instead of "here's what the data is showing us." No connection between what the team is doing and what the numbers are actually saying.
The fix is simpler than most people think. Start the meeting by pulling up the dashboard. Walk through the metrics. Let the numbers set the agenda.
When a manager opens a pipeline review by actually opening HubSpot, it sends a signal to the whole team: this data is real, it matters, and we run our business from it. Everything else, the side conversations, the judgment calls, the strategy discussions, can follow from there.
Tone at the top is everything here. If leadership doesn't reference the dashboards, nobody else will either.
You set a goal. You built a dashboard. You ran the initiative. And then nobody ever went back to ask if it worked.
The data goes off into the abyss. And every time that happens, you train your team that the data doesn't actually matter.
Next time you say, "Let's measure this and see what happens," nobody actually believes you.
Two quarters later, nobody can tell you whether the thing you invested in last quarter actually moved the needle.
Closing the loop doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a short summary at the end of the period: here's what the data showed, here's what we learned, here's where we're headed next. That works at the company level, the department level, or both.
What it creates is a regular rhythm. The numbers are in front of everyone. Reviewing results becomes a normal part of how the team operates, not a one-time event that gets skipped when things get busy.
The answer isn't a new dashboard.
It's deciding which reports you're actually going to use to make key business decisions. And making sure everyone on your team knows why.
If you're currently working through any of these challenges, we're happy to talk it through. My DMs are open.
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