Stop Measuring Productivity in Tickets Closed, Start Measuring Trust Built

Somewhere along the way, “leadership” in tech got reduced to dashboards and burndown charts.

How many tickets closed this sprint?
How many story points completed?
How fast did that team crank through the backlog?

Look, metrics have their place. But if your leadership boils down to counting tickets, you’re not leading, you’re babysitting output.

Here’s the real truth:
Teams don’t stick around for Jira reports. They stick around because they trust each other. They ship faster because they trust their leaders. They innovate because they trust that failure won’t be punished.

Trust is the multiplier. Without it, no amount of ticket-closing will save you.

A team that trusts you will work through fire for you. A team that doesn’t will sandbag, disengage, and quietly polish their LinkedIn profile.

So stop obsessing over the shallow metrics. Start asking yourself the harder questions:

• Do my people feel safe to tell me when something’s broken?
• Do they believe I have their back when they take a risk?
• Do they trust me to make decisions that aren’t just about my ego or my metrics dashboard?

Because here’s the kicker:
If you build trust, the tickets take care of themselves.
If you don’t, no amount of metrics will make you a leader worth following.