Setting an ambitious numerical target is the most effective way to ensure you never actually see the work being done. Most leadership manuals suggest that a “stretch goal” functions like a magnetic north, pulling the collective effort of a team toward a higher standard of efficiency.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how human systems respond to pressure. When a leader demands a thirty percent reduction in turnaround time without providing a structural change to the machinery of the work, they are not asking for creativity; they are asking for a more sophisticated level of concealment. The truth is pushed downward, replaced by a sanitized version of reality that fits the desired spreadsheet cell.

The Anatomy of the Spreadsheet Lie

The sequence of events usually follows a predictable arc. First, a planning sheet is circulated. It notes that last year’s average turnaround for a contract modification was 6.2 days. The new target, dictated by a desire for market competitiveness, is set at 4.3 days.

Under the “Initiatives” column, the document lists “focus on prioritization” and “process discipline.” These phrases are linguistic placeholders for “work harder.” The steps in the process remain exactly as they were: a request is received, it is reviewed by a junior analyst, it is sent to a senior manager for Approval 1, the changes are manually keyed into the legacy ledger, and finally, a VP provides Approval 2. Because the request intake remains an unformatted stream of emails, the system remains fragile.

To understand why the target fails, one must examine the latency (the time delay between a cause and its effect) inherent in the manual review phase. If a junior analyst receives a request but lacks the corresponding collateral history, they must pause the current task to locate the data. This creates a queue.

A numerical target does not provide the analyst with better data access; it merely increases the anxiety associated with the queue. When the pressure to hit 4.3 days becomes the primary measure of professional worth, the team does not find a faster way to find data. Instead, they find a way to stop the clock.

The Art of Shunting

By the third quarter, the average turnaround often drops to 4.4 days, a figure remarkably close to the target. However, this is rarely achieved through improved throughput (the rate at which a system processes its items). In most cases, it is achieved through a practice I call “shunting.”

The team decides that a request is not “officially” received until every piece of documentation is perfect. If an email arrives on Monday but is missing a signature, the clock does not start. The analyst spends Tuesday and Wednesday chasing the signature. When it arrives on Thursday, they log the request as “Received: Thursday.” The work is completed on Friday. The dashboard reports a one-day turnaround, while the customer has been waiting for five days.

Orion J.D., a specialist in dyslexia intervention who deals with the mechanics of cognitive processing speed, once explained the phenomenon to me in a different context.

“When you change the font size on a form to make it fit a smaller page, you haven’t made the student read faster; you’ve just made them squint harder.”

– Orion J.D., Specialist in Dyslexia Intervention

This applies directly to corporate operations. A target is a smaller page. The team is squinting, trying to make the same old, bulky process fit into a tighter timeline, and eventually, the eyes just give up.

The Friction of Forced Effort

I recently found myself force-quitting an application seventeen times in a single afternoon because I was trying to meet an arbitrary deadline on a system that had reached its functional limit. Each time I restarted the program, I was performing a reboot (the process of restarting a computer system, typically to recover from an error).

The “target” for my task was sixty minutes. The system’s “capability” was ninety minutes. By force-quitting, I was attempting to skip the wait times, but I was actually corrupting the very data I was trying to save. I was “working harder,” but I was producing zero value.

Breaking the Bottleneck

True improvement requires an honest assessment of the bottleneck (the specific stage in a process where the flow of data or materials is restricted). In most equipment finance operations, the bottleneck is not the lack of effort; it is the manual transfer of data between disconnected silos.

When an organization moves to a modern

equipment finance software

platform, they are not just asking people to be faster. They are changing the physics of the work.

An API-first architecture allows for interoperability (the ability of different computer systems to exchange and use information), which means the data from the origination phase flows directly into the servicing ledger without the need for manual re-keying.

When data flows automatically, the “Approval 1” step often disappears entirely, because the system can perform a validation (the process of checking the accuracy and quality of data before it is processed) against the existing contract rules in real-time.

This is how you actually cut thirty percent from your turnaround. You don’t do it by “focusing on prioritization.” You do it by removing the tasks that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If a manager has to spend three hours a day checking the work of an analyst who was manually typing numbers from a PDF into a green-screen terminal, the problem isn’t the manager’s speed; it’s the PDF.

The Cost of the Fiction

The deception is usually delivered politely and on time, often accompanied by a colorful PowerPoint deck showing a downward trend in turnaround days. But if you look at the “Quality” tab or the “Customer Satisfaction” score, you will see the cost of that lie.

You will see attrition (the gradual reduction in staff numbers through resignation or retirement) as your best people grow tired of the “shunting” game. They know the numbers are a fiction, and they know the “process discipline” meetings are a theater of the absurd.

To fix this, we must embrace transparency (the condition of being easy to see through or understand). We have to look at the 6.2 days and ask, “What is happening on day three?”

If day three is spent waiting for a return call from the accounting department to verify a payment, no amount of “discipline” will help. The solution is to integrate the accounting system with the portfolio management tool. If the data is visible to the analyst in real-time, day three disappears. That is a structural win.

Inputs vs. Results

We often fall into the trap of abstraction (the process of removing physical, spatial, or temporal details to focus on higher-level concepts). We treat “Turnaround Time” as a number we can dial up or down like a volume knob.

But that number is a result, not an input. If you want a different result, you must change the inputs. You must provide the team with tools that offer scalability (the capacity to change in size or scale to meet increased demand) without requiring a proportional increase in manual labor.

I stopped believing in targets because I saw what they did to the culture of a back office. I saw people who were hired for their intelligence and their attention to detail spend their days manipulating timestamps to satisfy a manager who refused to invest in a better ledger.

It is a form of professional gaslighting. We tell them the system is fine and the problem is their “focus,” while the software they are using looks like something salvaged from a Cold War bunker.

When you provide a team with a unified platform for contract administration, asset tracking, and billing, you are giving them back the hours they used to spend in the “shunted” zone. You are allowing them to actually perform the work instead of managing the perception of the work.

The Reconciliation Debt

In the end, the 4.3-day target was met, but the department’s error rate increased by 22%. The team was so focused on hitting the “Received-to-Approved” metric that they stopped checking the reconciliation (the process of ensuring that two sets of records are in agreement) of the tax fields.

The faster they went, the more they broke. The “savings” from the faster turnaround were entirely consumed by the cost of fixing the billing errors four months later.

If you want to move faster, stop looking at the clock and start looking at the tools. A target is just a wish until it is supported by a process that can actually sustain it. When we prioritize the reporting over the reality, we lose both. We lose the truth of where we are, and we lose the path to where we want to be.

The focus should always remain on the in-life change capability of the system. In the world of equipment leasing, where a single contract might undergo five modifications over its term, the ability to handle those changes without manual intervention is the difference between a profitable book and a liability.

We must stop asking our people to “squint harder” at the old forms and instead give them a system where the data is clear, the connections are automatic, and the truth is something we actually want to see.