To Count or not to Count?
That is the question. 
January 1, 2026
The start of a new year has a way of waking up the accountant in all of us.
Fresh calendars invite fresh counting…last year’s totals, this year’s targets, and the numbers we’re quietly hoping will finally validate us by the end of December.
Show me a leader, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t likely an accountant—but absolutely loves numbers.
Leaders count. We count followers, attendance, seats, sales, completed projects, square footage, donors, dollars, downloads, likes, and views.
If we’re honest, we also count how our numbers compare to their numbers.
Numbers feel solid.
Reassuring.
Objective.
You can drop them into a spreadsheet and feel productive before lunch.
Somewhere along the way, counting gets quietly confused with purpose and the role of leadership itself. The assumption sneaks in; the better the leader, the bigger the numbers.
Growth equals health. Expansion equals success.
And before we know it, leadership becomes less about people and more about scorekeeping.
But is that leadership or is it empire building with a dashboard?
Counting isn’t wrong. Leaders should pay attention. Taking stock matters. But when leaders spend more energy measuring their influence than stewarding it, they lose the plot.
Numbers are a report, not a revelation.
They tell you what happened, not why it matters. They can measure output, but they can’t name meaning…and when leaders confuse the scoreboard with the story, they start optimizing for what’s easy to count instead of what’s truly worth building.
Leadership is meant to be transformational and impactful, not merely accumulative. Impacted lives don’t always scale neatly. Faithfulness rarely fits in a pie chart. And some of the most important work a leader does will never trend upward on a graph… or be noticed in the moment.
Ironically, great leaders often reduce numbers on purpose. They prune. They choose alignment over volume, depth over breadth, ownership over spectatorship. They understand that a few fully committed people will carry a vision farther—and longer—than a crowd of loosely attached admirers.
So yes—count when you need to. Just don’t let the numbers count you.
Because the moment counting becomes your identity, leadership quietly turns into the management of appearances rather than the cultivation of real impact.
And no spreadsheet has ever changed a life.
Happy New Year!
Todd Rutkowski
Read more reflections like “To Count or not to Count" in my free ebook called “Lifelines.” Get Lifelines
