Based on my experience automated reporting dashboards start to cause damage where they are allowed to become visible by higher-ups in the org. A dashboard is immensely powerful for the immediate manager to know how their team is doing, identify problems and work with the members to resolve those problems. As with many things, the numbers on a dashboard must be read with context and the closer you are to that team, the better.
The moment the dashboard is accessed by higher ups, several things happen: The devs become scrutinized by higher-ups that do not have all the context to make sense of the numbers, the manager is rendered ineffective because the knowledge and power they had while reporting to their superiors is taken away, and upper management will inevitably start caring about the numbers on the dashboard, and nothing else.
There is a level of "managing upwards" that lazy direct managers struggle with, and they just pass on the reporting numbers as-is without really caring what this might result in.
Yep. It's for exactly this reason that I've told potential vendors in the past that not exposing, and preferably not gathering, individual contributor metrics was a hard requirement. I'd rather have individual team leads or scrum masters have to gather their own stats than have people with disproportionate organisational leverage exposed to information they don't know they aren't qualified to interpret.
Metrics are useful, but only with context. Any metrics reported at skip level by definition lack context: there's no ground-level engagement or time to dig into details. Ergo, the reported numbers are understood as the only numbers.
With the exact solution you offered! Use them, but only at the level in which additional context is available, then report up new numbers that allow for enriching / adjusting the base numbers.
It's about safe space. We're not just cogs in the machine. We exists as humans with our own sets of fluctuating of emotional and psychological states. Break that at your own peril.
The moment the dashboard is accessed by higher ups, several things happen: The devs become scrutinized by higher-ups that do not have all the context to make sense of the numbers, the manager is rendered ineffective because the knowledge and power they had while reporting to their superiors is taken away, and upper management will inevitably start caring about the numbers on the dashboard, and nothing else.
There is a level of "managing upwards" that lazy direct managers struggle with, and they just pass on the reporting numbers as-is without really caring what this might result in.