Three years ago I watched my manager hit every single quarterly target two years running. Clean dashboards. Green everywhere, all the time. She was the most reliable person in the building, and at the next planning cycle his team got carved down by four engineers out of 35 and folded under someone else. Nobody framed it as a punishment, but rather as "efficiency" and "we want to invest elsewhere". The lesson landed anyway, and not just on me. Sadly, never on my manager.
If you finish 100 percent of what you committed to, you have not proven you are excellent. You have proven you had more people than the work required. That is the only thing a green board says to the VP 3 layers above you. The work was sized to the team, the team cleared it, therefore the team can be smaller at the cost of the 10-20% least important. You built the case against yourself and presented it in a quarterly review with hopes of getting a promotion.
So the people who survive and thrive learn to land around 80 percent. Not 50, which reads as a team that cannot execute. Not 95, which is just 100 with a rounding error. Around 70-80, where the story is along the lines of: we are clearly doing a lot, we are clearly close, and the team would benefit from getting more engineers. Missing that last fifth is how you say "give me two more engineers" without ever filing the request. The gap is the request.
I want to insist
I want to be precise about what this is, because it is easy to hear it as laziness or fraud and it is usually neither. The competent version of this is not slacking. It is overcommitting on purpose. You take on more than you can finish, you finish most of it, and the leftover becomes evidence of ambition rather than evidence of failure. A manager who commits to ten things and ships eight reads as hungry. A manager who commits to eight and ships eight reads as comfortable, and comfortable is the word that precedes a reorg. Leadership does not reward the team that fit its goals to its size. It rewards the team that looks starved.
The tell is in how planning meetings actually run. Watch who pads. The experienced managers walk in and ask for headcount they have already decided they will not fully justify by year end, because next year's ask starts from this year's gap. The number you missed by is the opening bid for the number you get next time. I have sat in rooms where a VP looked at a team that delivered everything and said, with no irony, that he was worried they were not being ambitious enough. The team that missed by 20 got the new req. This is not a hypothetical pattern I am extrapolating. It is the most boringly consistent thing I have seen across three companies. Your VP doesn't know what you're doing, they see excels.
Happens in downturns too..
The objection is that none of this survives a bad year. When the cuts come from above and they are real, the argument goes, the steady deliverer is protected and the chronic misser is the obvious line item. I think that gets the timing exactly backwards. In a real cut, the person deciding does not open a spreadsheet of attainment percentages. They look at which teams are visibly maxed out and which ones have slack, and the team that hit 100 percent on a comfortable plan is the one wearing the slack on its sleeve. Or even if they don't think that, company can get ahead with ~80% of your teams work anyway. The deliverer made the case that the work could be done with less. The misser made the case that there was never enough to begin with. One of those is a much harder team to cut without something visibly breaking, and managers protect the teams whose pain would be loud.
I am not telling you to go sandbag. I am telling you that the incentive is built to produce sandbagging, and pretending otherwise is how ambitious managers walk into planning, hit their numbers, feel good about it, and lose people. If your reward for finishing the work is a smaller team next quarter, you are not being measured on output. You are being measured on how convincingly you can stay hungry. The managers who understand that never let the board go fully green.