Every leader has panicked over a number that hadn't moved yet — and had no way to tell if the worry was justified. That's not a patience problem. It's a measurement problem.
In this episode, Jeff Payne breaks down the difference between leading and lagging indicators — and why staring at the wrong one can sink a plan that's actually working, or hide a real problem until it's expensive to fix. This is a companion piece to Episode 34, "The Click Isn't Coming Back," which applied this idea specifically to AI search traffic. Episode 48 pulls the lens back: this isn't a marketing rule, it's a leadership rule that happens to show up in marketing.
Jeff closes with a three-question framework any leader can use to check whether they're watching the right dial — on a marketing plan, a hiring build, a product launch, or anything else where effort and payoff are separated by time.
Jeff Payne
Every leader I know has at some point panicked over a number that hadn't moved yet, and been right to worry or wrong to worry, and had no way to tell the difference. That's not a patience problem, that's a measurement problem. You're staring at the wrong dial. Hi, I'm Jeff Payne. You're listening to The Jeff Payne Show, episode number forty-eight: The Wrong Dial. Here's the situation. You commit to a plan where the real payoff is months out: a marketing investment, a hiring build, a new product, a culture change you're trying to push through a whole organization. There's a gap between the work and the result. That gap is normal. It's not a flaw in the plan. It's just how cause and effect work when the effect is big enough to matter. But during that gap, the person funding the plan, sometimes that's you, sometimes it's your board, your partner, or your client, needs something to look at. And almost every time they reach for the easiest number to see, which is usually the final result itself: revenue, signed deals, traffic, the scoreboard. Here's the problem. That number isn't the last thing to move, not the first There are two kinds of numbers in any plan: a lagging indicator telling you what's already happened, and a leading indicator tells you whether what's happening right now is going to produce that result later. We actually talked about a version of this on the show before, episode number thirty-four. If you wanna go back in the specific context of AI search traffic, the point there was that clicks are the wrong scoreboard because a click is a lagging signal, and the fix was watching earlier signals instead. Turns out that's not only a search marketing rule, it's a leadership rule that happens to show up in search marketing. Anywhere effort and results are separated by a lag, hiring, product development, a culture initiative, a sales process overhaul, the same trap is sitting there waiting for you. And it cuts two ways. If the person funding the plan is watching the lagging number and it hasn't moved yet, they conclude nothing is happening. They panic. They second-guess. They pull resources right when the plan might be exactly on pace. Or the opposite happens. Something is quietly failing, and the lagging number won't reveal it for months, so it burns budget and goodwill before anyone notices there's a problem at all. Either way, the team executing the plan and the person judging it are looking at two different clocks. This isn't a new idea. Even if it feels every time you're the one living through the gap, decades ago, management researchers built what's called the balanced scorecard specifically to solve this problem. The idea that a company's financial results are lagging indicators, and if that's the only thing on the dashboard, you're always finding out about a problem after it's too late to fix cheaply. The fix wasn't to ignore the financial number. It was to sit leading operational measures next to it, the things that move first and predict where the lagging number is headed. That's the whole move, not abandoning the scoreboard. Put in a second dial next to it, one that tells you today whether tomorrow's number is going to be good or bad news. So here's where I land this. Not a dashboard template, three questions. First What's the lagging number everyone's eventually going to judge this plan by? Name it specifically. Is it revenue, traffic, retention? Whatever it is. Second, what are the two or three le- leading indicators that predict it? The things that move first, weeks or months before the lagging number does. And last, and this is the one people skip, which one are you actually reporting on right now? Not which one you know your matters. Which one is on the page in front of you, on your board or your clients this week? If the answer to, three isn't answer to two, you don't have a measurement problem yet, you have one coming. A dashboard has been more than one dial on it. Most people only ever learn to read one, the big one in the middle, the one that shows the results. But the result is the last thing to move, not the first. If you wanna know whether a plan is working before it's too late to matter, stop watching the dial that tells you what has already happened. Watch ones that tell you what's about to. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.
