You Get the Behaviour You Measure. You Also Lose the One You Don't.

In short: Simon Sinek's latest lands on something every leader should have tattooed somewhere — you get the behaviour you measure. I'd push it one step further. The reason leaders so often measure the wrong thing isn't carelessness; it's that the wrong thing is the measurable thing. And the behaviour that actually drives performance is usually the one nobody is counting — so it quietly disappears.

This is one thread in the full Why Is Your Team Bogged Down? argument.

Sinek's argument is that our teams optimise for whatever we choose to measure, and that the wrong metrics slowly corrode culture, motivation and trust. It's hard to disagree. But it raises a question worth sitting with: if measuring the wrong thing is so damaging, why do genuinely capable leaders keep doing it?

The wrong metric wins because it's the easy one

The uncomfortable answer is that the wrong metric is usually the one you can measure. Process compliance, activity counts, hours logged, boxes ticked — these are concrete, auditable and easy to defend in a meeting. The things that actually create value — the quality of a judgement call, how fast a sound decision gets made — are slippery and hard to put a number against. So leaders reach for the measurable proxy, and Sinek's law does the rest: the organisation dutifully optimises for the proxy instead of the point.

You get the behaviour you measure — and lose the one you don't

There's a mirror image to Sinek's rule that gets far less attention. If behaviour flows toward what you measure, it flows away from what you don't. Whatever you leave uncounted becomes invisible, and invisible things are the first to be sacrificed when pressure comes on.

In most organisations the great unmeasured variable is decision-making speed — how long it actually takes to reach a decision and what that delay costs. Because it never shows up on a dashboard, it's the first thing quietly traded away to protect the metric that does. Nobody decides to slow down. They just keep the measured number looking healthy, and the unmeasured one rots.

It's worst where nothing corrects it

Here's where I'd sharpen Sinek's warning. In a competitive market, measuring the wrong thing eventually shows up as lost customers — a crude but real feedback loop that drags the metrics back toward reality. Remove that pressure, as you do across much of the public sector, and nothing corrects a bad metric. Procedural correctness becomes the safe, measured, rewarded behaviour, and the predictable result is defensive, slow decision-making — what we call decision friction. Everyone stays busy doing measurable things correctly while the real work of deciding grinds to a crawl.

Measure the thing that's actually moving

Sinek is careful to say the usual metrics aren't so much wrong as incomplete. Agreed — so let me name the specific piece that's missing: the speed and quality of decisions. You don't need to time-stamp every call to get at it. Track value delivered against effort spent and most of the variation you see is decision speed showing up in the numbers. Then reward the timely, sound judgement instead of quietly punishing it.

Measure that, and by Sinek's own logic you'll start to get more of it. The alternative is exactly the trap he's describing: an organisation full of people diligently producing the behaviour you asked for, while the behaviour you actually needed goes unmeasured, unrewarded, and undone.

Curious which behaviours your current measures are quietly producing? The Friction Factor survey is a fast first read on where decision friction may be costing you.