Bonus 10 — The Manager Dashboard — KPIs Every Manager Should Own

60-Second Summary

Bonus module 10 of the program (Critical Skills extension). Theme: What you measure is what you manage.
Monthly dashboard review (30 min, last Friday) — the ritual you install.
Same rhythm as weeks 1–12: pre-read, cohort live, ritual, falsifiable homework.
Closes a high-priority gap most new-manager programs ignore.

Most new managers run their team on vibes. They notice attrition only after the fact, discover capacity problems mid-quarter, and 'find out' a top performer was unhappy when the offer letter from a competitor is already signed. A managed team has a dashboard. This module builds yours.

What the evidence says

Drucker: 'what gets measured gets managed' — overused but accurate; teams without metrics drift toward the loudest voice.
Gallup Q12: the highest-leverage manager metrics are non-obvious (clarity of expectations, recognition cadence, growth conversations) — not output volume.
Bock (Google): the People Analytics function exists because the gap between manager intuition and ground truth is large and predictable.

Pre-read (60 minutes)

Read: the difference between leading indicators (signal of future outcome) and lagging indicators (record of past outcome) (15 min).
Read: the 10 most common manager dashboard metrics — definitions, formulas, and pitfalls (25 min).
Read: vanity metrics vs actionable metrics (10 min).
Reflect (10 min): what 3 numbers would you check tomorrow if your team's health depended on them? Why aren't they on your dashboard already?

Live session (90 minutes)

Cohort flow with a senior coach

1
Metric tree (20 min)
Coach walks through the standard manager dashboard: 4 people metrics (attrition, hiring velocity, engagement, high-performer risk), 4 work metrics (goal completion, delivery throughput, on-time rate, capacity utilisation), 2 health metrics (PTO balance, 1:1 cadence). Cohort marks which they currently track.
2
Build your own (25 min)
Each manager drafts their own 8–10 metric dashboard with definitions and data sources. Coach challenges every metric: how would the team game this? Is it actionable?
3
High-performer risk score (15 min)
Coach demonstrates a simple 5-question risk score — tenure since last promotion, recent recognition, scope growth, manager-rated retention risk, market hotness. Cohort scores their team.
4
Review cadence (15 min)
Coach walks through the monthly dashboard review ritual: 30 minutes solo, look for trends not absolute values, write the 3-sentence narrative, share one signal with your manager.
5
Wrap (15 min)
Each manager commits to which 8 metrics they'll instrument this month, in which tool, by which date.

The ritual you install

Monthly dashboard review (30 min, last Friday)

Pull all 8–10 metrics into one view. Note month-over-month change. Write a 3-sentence narrative: what's improving, what's declining, what I'm doing about the declines. Share the narrative — not the raw numbers — with your manager in your next 1:1. Over a year, you'll build the most accurate model of your team that anyone has, including HR.

Modern tools for this skill

Category	Examples (2026)	Use
People analytics	Lattice Analytics, CultureAmp, Visier, Worklytics, internal BI	Pulls people metrics into one view
Delivery metrics	Linear Cycles, Jira velocity, Notion projects, Shortcut	Throughput, on-time rate, cycle time
Custom dashboards	Notion, Google Sheets, Hex, Metabase, Mode	Roll your own when SaaS isn't enough
Manager scorecards	Lattice / Workday manager-effectiveness scores, 360 cadence	Your KPIs as a manager, not just your team's

Copy-paste AI prompt

I manage a team of [size, function]. Help me design a manager dashboard with 8–10 KPIs. For each KPI: (1) one-line definition, (2) why it matters for my team specifically, (3) data source I can realistically pull from, (4) how the team might game it and how to guard against that, (5) a target or healthy range.

Homework — falsifiable artefacts

Manager dashboard defined — 8–10 KPIs with definitions and data sources.
First month's dashboard pulled and reviewed.
3-sentence narrative drafted and shared with your manager.
High-performer risk score completed for every report.

Success signal

By end of this module, you have a dashboard you actually open monthly, you can answer 'how's your team doing?' with numbers and trend not vibes, and you've named at least one high-performer retention risk before it becomes urgent.

Reviewer notes

HR Director (15+ yrs)

The managers who survive scale are the ones who instrument. It doesn't matter whether it's a polished Looker dashboard or a Google Sheet — what matters is that they look at the same numbers every month and notice when something changes.

Line Manager (20+ yrs)

I resisted dashboards for years as 'corporate'. Then I missed two regrettable exits in the same quarter that the numbers would have flagged. I've kept a sheet ever since.

OB / HR Professor (25+ yrs)

The behavioural economics of monitoring is well-studied: people manage to what's visible. The risk of dashboards is gaming and tunnel vision; the answer is balanced scorecards (Kaplan & Norton) — never measure one dimension in isolation.

Written by Pawan Joshi.Sources cited inline.

First published 30 Jun 2026See site changelog →