When you lead a single team, the frameworks are everywhere. Team health surveys. Sprint velocity. Delivery metrics. Engagement scores. Someone’s built a Miro board for every possible dimension of team performance.

Then you become a leader of leaders.

Suddenly the guidance gets vague. “Build organizational capability.” “Develop your people.” “Create strategy.” These phrases show up in your job description, in performance reviews, in leadership books. But what do they actually mean? How do you know if you’re doing them well?

As I grew as a leader, I lacked a structured way to show how I improved things beyond “teams deliver and people are happy.” Those matter. But when you’re responsible for multiple teams, for an entire area of the business, there’s supposed to be something more. Everyone says so. Nobody tells you what.

The Fixer

At Pleo, I became known as “the fixer.” When new people joined, others would say: “You should talk to Stefan. He’s our fixer. We give him an area and he just takes it and makes it better, more mature, more standalone.”

I did this multiple times. Different areas, different problems, but the same pattern emerged. I developed a repeatable way of thinking about what maturity actually means when you’re responsible for more than a single team.

These five dimensions became my scorecard. Not because I read them in a book, but because they were the areas where I could take responsibility and show concrete progress over time.

Why These Five?

Not every dimension of organizational performance belongs on your scorecard. You can’t own the market. You can’t control the CEO’s decisions. You can’t take credit for luck.

Your scorecard needs two qualities:

Within your control or sphere of influence. These had to be things I could actually change. Not external factors. Not dependencies on other parts of the company. Areas where I could take action and see results.

Helps the collective, not just you. These couldn’t be about my individual performance. They had to improve the group’s capability as a whole. When these dimensions improved, everyone got better.

When someone asked “What did you improve?” I could point to concrete changes in each of these five areas. That’s what made them real.

If you’re building your own scorecard: pick dimensions you can own that help the collective succeed. Everything else is commentary.

1. Practical, Tangible, Understandable Direction

People can’t execute on slides and goals alone.

I’ve seen this countless times as a consultant: leadership creates a strategy deck, sets OKRs, communicates them at all-hands. Everyone nods. Then people go back to their desks and ask “So what are we actually doing?”

The problem isn’t that people don’t understand the words. The problem is they can’t see what changes in the world.

I learned a structure from Ebi Atawodi on Lenny’s Podcast - telling direction as a fairytale:

“Once upon a time…” The current state and problems. What’s broken? What’s frustrating? What’s the world we’re living in today?

“Then one day…” The change event. What we’re going to do. The decision, the shift, the new approach.

“The outcome…” How the world looks after. What’s different for users, for the team, for the business?

This isn’t poetry. It’s clarity. When you can tell your strategy as a story - with a clear before, during, and after - people can retell it. They can explain it to new hires. They can make decisions aligned with it.

Then you connect the fairytale to concrete goals. The narrative shows where we’re going. The goals show how we measure progress.

What changed: Direction became something people could understand and act on, not just read and forget.

2. Strong Foundations - Who Does What When

Organizations aren’t fixed overnight by one big initiative.

I’ve seen leaders try this repeatedly. Launch a transformation program. Run a major reorganization. Bring in a new framework. Declare things fixed.

Six months later, nothing has actually changed.

Improvement requires consistency and structure. It requires knowing who does what when.

This became my operating principle: clear cadences, structured agendas, clear roles, clear expectations.

Not exciting. Not innovative. But foundational.

These foundations work for teams, but they also work for you. When you’re starting in a new area or taking on a new leadership role, you need to balance focus: roughly 60% on establishing team structures and 40% on your own understanding and learning. In the early months, you might even skew more toward yourself—observing patterns, understanding the domain, building relationships. The cadences and structures aren’t just for your teams; they’re scaffolding for your own effectiveness.

When people know there’s a weekly leadership sync, and it always has the same structure, and everyone knows their role - that predictability creates space for actual work. When you establish a rhythm for how decisions get made, for how information flows, for how problems surface - improvement becomes possible.

What changed: From ad hoc firefighting to predictable structure. From “let me check with Stefan” to “here’s how we handle this.” The foundation enabled continuous improvement instead of one-time fixes.

Your scorecard question: Can you point to the structures and rhythms you established? Or are you still the single point of coordination?

3. Motivated Individuals in High-Performing Teams

Let me be honest: this dimension is more standard than the others.

Everyone talks about team health. Engagement surveys exist. People managers know they’re supposed to care about motivation and performance.

But here’s the question: Are you deliberately measuring and improving it? Or are you just assuming it’s fine?

When you lead multiple teams, it’s easy to think “the teams seem okay” and move on to other things. You check in occasionally. You hear some feedback. Nobody’s quit recently. Things must be fine.

Making this explicit on your scorecard means you’re actually doing the work. You’re spending time talking and listening to people - not just the people who report directly to you. You’re measuring systematically. You’re tracking trends.

I like tools like Spotify’s team health check, Teamprature, or measuring against Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions. But honestly? The specific framework matters less than two things:

You look for trends. This is a months and quarters thing, not days and weeks. One bad survey result isn’t a crisis. A declining trend over three months is.

You respect that teams are different. Don’t compare across teams. Team A’s scores don’t mean Team B is failing. Different contexts, different challenges, different starting points.

You create space to discuss the hard topics. The real value of systematic measurement is that it gives you a structured way to talk about talent with your leadership peers and your own leaders. You need to celebrate the high performers, yes—but you also need to discuss the individuals who are struggling and need help. And sometimes, you need to talk about people who might need to part ways with the organization. Without a structured approach built on data and trends, these conversations never happen with the clarity and honesty they require.

What changed: From assumed to measured. From “teams seem okay” to “here’s the trend and here’s what we’re doing about it.” From avoiding difficult talent conversations to having them with structure and compassion.

Your scorecard question: Can you show how team health has improved under your leadership? And can you talk honestly about individual performance—both excellent and struggling—with supporting data?

4. Leadership Is a Team Game

Just because you’re the designated leader doesn’t mean you lead alone.

This sounds obvious. Everyone nods when you say it. Then you watch how organizations actually work.

One person makes all the calls. Everyone else waits for direction. Individual contributors defer to managers. Managers defer to you. Leadership becomes something only one person does.

I learned this differently: everyone needs to show leadership, not just me.

Individual contributors who spot problems and drive solutions - that’s leadership. Team leads who make hard calls without escalating everything - that’s leadership. People who see gaps and fill them - that’s leadership.

Your job isn’t to be the only leader. Your job is to create conditions where everyone exercises leadership in their role.

This means you explicitly expect it. You recognize it when you see it. You make space for it. You don’t hoard decision-making or become the bottleneck for everything important.

When people introduced me as “the fixer,” the real work was making sure I wasn’t the only person who could fix things. We all had a part to play in leading.

What changed: From “Stefan fixes things” to “we all lead.” Leadership capacity scaled across the group - not just the leadership team, but ICs, managers, everyone.

Your scorecard question: Can you point to examples of leadership at every level? Or does everything important still run through you?

5. High Expectations, But There to Help

Many leaders set high expectations and then disappear.

They tell people what excellence looks like. They make the standards clear. They hold people accountable. Then when someone struggles, they’re nowhere to be found.

The bar is high, but you’re on your own reaching it.

I made a different commitment: high expectations, and I’m there to help.

This means setting clear, ambitious standards. Not lowering the bar. Not accepting mediocrity. But when someone faces a hard problem, I’m available. When they’re stuck, we pair on it. When they need coaching, I show up.

This isn’t about being everyone’s safety net. It’s about being present when people are pushing themselves to meet high expectations.

Pairing on a technical problem. Coaching someone through a difficult conversation. Working through a strategic decision together. Actually being there, not just saying “let me know if you need help” and hoping they don’t.

We wanted to scale this commitment across the organization. Not just from me, but from everyone in the area. This was a way to create unity - high bar, active support from everyone, not just top-down help.

What changed: People knew the expectations were ambitious AND knew we’d help each other get there. Different from the “demand excellence and disappear” model too many leaders use.

Your scorecard question: When people on your teams face hard challenges, are you actually there? Or are you too busy to help?

Your Scorecard

These five dimensions became my scorecard at Pleo.

Not because they’re universal. Not because I found them in a leadership book. But because they were the areas where I could take full responsibility and demonstrate concrete progress over time.

When someone asked “What did you improve?” I could point to specific changes:

  • Direction people could understand and retell
  • Structures and rhythms that enabled continuous improvement
  • Team health I was deliberately tracking and improving
  • Leadership capacity across the entire group, not just me
  • A culture where we set the bar high and helped each other reach it

These dimensions mattered because they were within my control and they helped us as a collective.

Your scorecard will be different. Different context, different challenges, different strengths.

But the principle is the same: pick dimensions you can own that help the collective succeed. Make them explicit. Track them. Show progress.

When you can’t answer “What did you improve?” with concrete examples, you don’t have a scorecard. You have a job description.

Build yours.