The chase
The chase is the recurring failure mode where leadership KPIs only get reported on when the founder personally pursues them — the diagnostic signature of a leadership team without a real weekly close.
**The chase** is the recurring failure mode where leadership numbers only surface when the founder personally pursues them. Pipeline gets reported because the founder asked. Burn gets reported because the founder asked. Retention gets reported because the board call is tomorrow and the founder asked twice. Without the founder's pull, the numbers do not move from the people who hold them to the people who decide on them.
The chase is not laziness on the part of the team. It is the rational response to a leadership system that has no other forcing function. If reports are only required when asked for, the optimal behaviour is to wait to be asked. The chase is the absence of a system, made visible.
Where it comes from
Two conditions are sufficient to produce the chase. The first is plural or absent KPI ownership — when no one human is named, no one submits unprompted. The second is the absence of a fixed weekly close — when there is no recurring deadline, the number is reported when convenient for the holder, which usually means after a request from the founder. Either condition alone produces some chase. Both together produce a leadership team that runs entirely on the founder's energy.
What it costs
The chase is expensive on three axes the founder feels and one the rest of the company feels:
- Founder time — the hours per week spent pulling numbers from people who already have them are the most expensive hours in the company.
- Decision latency — the gap between when a number breaks and when leadership sees it widens to a week or more, and most of that week is recoverable operating time.
- Founder posture — the founder's relationship to the leadership team becomes 'the person who asks for numbers', which is the wrong relationship for the work they should be doing.
- Team posture — the leadership team learns that submission is a request-response loop rather than an owned commitment, which is the posture you do not want in the people you have hired to run the business.
How to extinguish it
The chase ends when the conditions that produce it end. Name a single human owner per KPI. Install a fixed weekly close with a published deadline. Publish the consolidated signal on the same day every week regardless of whether anyone is in the building. After three to four cycles, the team learns that submission is not optional and that missed submissions show up in the signal without the founder having to mention them. The chase becomes self-extinguishing — the cost of being the missing entry on the close is higher than the cost of submitting on time.
There is no halfway version of this. A close that is sometimes enforced is a chase with extra steps. A close with consequences only when the founder is paying attention is a chase the founder has scheduled. The mechanism only works when the cadence is real.
The diagnostic
The cleanest diagnostic for whether a leadership team is in the chase is to ask the founder a single question: in the last four weeks, on how many days did you have to ask someone for a number that should have been on a leadership KPI report? If the answer is more than four — roughly one a week — the team is in the chase, regardless of how mature the dashboards look.