Last spring, I did what any self-respecting leadership expert, psychologist (and slightly desperate) soccer coach would do when faced with a losing season.

I read a management book-not just any book-John Doerr's bestselling Measure What Matters.

Now, I recognize that when your soccer team finishes dead last in the conference, reading a business book might not be the first thing most coaches would do. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We hadn't made the playoffs, and somewhere along the way, I had begun to wonder whether I'd lost my Midas touch for building winning teams.

We needed to score more goals.

Wayne Gretzky is widely credited with saying, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." I had my Eureka moment!  “More shots = more goals = problem solved.” I was ready to order the championship rings.

There was just one small problem.

The data didn't agree.

The Seduction of the Obvious

Doerr's Measure What Matters explores Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a framework developed by Intel's Andy Grove and later championed at Google to drive their high performance culture. The premise is simple. Objectives describe what you want to accomplish. Key results provide measurable evidence of progress. The magic lies in choosing the right measures, but what happens when we choose the wrong measures?

We began examining our soccer analytics. Shots attempted, passes completed, possession and shooting locations were all logical indicators of offensive success that should lead to more goals, yet the data did not support the assumptions.

As we dug deeper, an unexpected pattern emerged. The strongest relationship we identified with goal scoring wasn't the number of passes completed or shots attempted.

It was the number of defensive battles we won.

Let that sink in.

We wanted to score more goals, and the answer appeared to be defending better. Insert Scooby Doo voice here (Dudh?)

When we examined the game more closely, it made sense. Winning possession higher up the field catches opponents out of position, disrupts their defensive structure, and creates opportunities to attack before they reorganize.

Our data showed an association, not proof of causation, but it challenged our assumptions. We had been staring at the wrong end of the field, and it made me wonder how many leaders are doing precisely the same thing.

What if the behaviour that creates the result is hiding somewhere other than where the result appears?

When Measuring Performance Makes Performance Worse

In 1975, organizational scholar Steven Kerr published a wonderfully titled paper: On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. His central observation was that organizations routinely reward one behaviour while hoping for another.

• They preach teamwork but reward individual achievement.
• They demand innovation but punish failure.
• They encourage long-term thinking but celebrate quarterly results.

Consider a sales manager who wants to increase revenue. The solution seems obvious. More calls should produce more conversations, more opportunities, and ultimately more sales. So, the manager starts measuring calls. Leaderboards appear. Bonuses are introduced. Employees are praised for their activity, and something remarkable happens. The organization becomes exceptionally good at making telephone calls. We think we have solved the problem. 

Whether anyone is buying anything is another question. The organization hasn't necessarily improved its sales performance. It has improved its ability to produce the number it chose to reward.

This is the danger of measurement. Choose the wrong metric, attach enough recognition to it, and you can create an organization that becomes remarkably efficient at doing the wrong thing.

You can hit every target on your dashboard and still miss the point.

We Celebrate the Harvest and Ignore the Planting

Think about our soccer team. One player takes six shots and scores nothing. Another wins 12 defensive battles, creating several dangerous attacking opportunities.

Who gets the applause? Usually, the player taking the shots.

His contributions are visible. The crowd notices. The statistics are easy to understand. Meanwhile, the player doing the less glamorous work receives little attention.

Organizations do this constantly.

• We celebrate the salesperson who closes the deal, not the colleague who spent months building the relationship.
• We recognize the executive who delivers impressive quarterly numbers, not the manager patiently developing tomorrow's talent.
• We applaud innovation but overlook the psychological safety that allows someone to propose an unpopular idea.

Don't Just Measure It. Make It Matter.

Discovering the right metric is only half the challenge. The other half is reinforcing the behaviours that produce results.

For me, that meant changing the conversations I had with my players. If defensive battles mattered, I needed to show players how winning possession created scoring opportunities. I needed to recognize the anticipation, effort and discipline behind those recoveries, and I needed to celebrate those behaviours before the goals arrived. That's how leaders turn information into action.

Data informs.    

Interpretation creates understanding.     

Recognition reinforces action.

Repetition builds culture.

Too many organizations invest in sophisticated dashboards that explain what happened last quarter but fail to influence what happens tomorrow. A dashboard that tells you in December why you failed in March is an excellent historical document. It isn't necessarily an effective leadership tool. The real leadership challenge is to identify the behaviours that drive performance, test whether they genuinely matter, and reinforce them while there's still time to influence the outcome.

I started this journey wanting to score more goals. I expected the answer to involve shooting, passing and attacking. Instead, our data pointed toward defending. John Doerr was right. We need to measure what matters. We need to recognize, reward and encourage the repetition of what matters because this becomes our culture.

Sometimes, if you want to score more goals, you need to stop talking about shooting, and start talking about defending.