The KPI Illusion: Why Performance Metrics Are Failing Middle Managers, According to Veejay Madhavan
“You don’t even need to make profitability a KPI,” says Veejay Madhavan. “That’s just basic hygiene.”
For someone who spent decades as a corporate CEO, Veejay is disarmingly blunt about the sacred cows of business performance. Among them: Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs.
“We’re given financial KPIs like revenue and margins,” he continues, “but if the company isn’t profitable, no one has a job. That’s foundational. That should be a dashboard item, not a KPI.”
In his view, today’s metrics often miss the mark—not because numbers don’t matter, but because the people executing against those numbers are neither aligned nor equipped to succeed. As the founder of Oulbyz, a consulting firm focused on building high-performing, multigenerational teams in the age of AI, Veejay has turned his attention to a quietly failing layer of most organizations: middle management.
“If your KPIs don’t make sense to the people who are supposed to deliver them, what are they good for?”
The disconnect between strategy and execution
At the heart of Veejay Madhavan’s critique is a simple disconnect: boards and executives set high-level financial targets, but those mandates are rarely translated into actionable objectives for those below.
“We cannot block, copy-paste a KPI that the board has given and say, ‘Okay, this is our KPI at the leadership level.’ The leadership level has to look at everything. That’s their job. But it doesn’t mean the same KPI should trickle down unchanged.”
This, he says, is where most organizations falter. Metrics that might be strategically valid at the top lose coherence further down the chain. Worse, they often become sources of confusion or inertia.
He offers a scenario: “Say you give someone a KPI of generating $100 million in revenue. They don’t control that. They can’t determine how much a customer will spend, which package they’ll choose, or whether they even stay. But if you say, ‘We need to find 100,000 corporate customers who have the pain points we solve,’ that makes sense. That’s something they can do.”
In other words, KPIs should reflect control and influence, not just ambition.
On why managers feel lost
The result of this misalignment? Exhausted, confused middle managers.
“Everything in a company seems to be urgent and important,” he says. “How can there be a hundred things that are urgent? If everything’s urgent, something is wrong.”
He paints a picture of managers constantly pulled in all directions—upward to leadership, downward to their teams, and sideways across functions—with no clarity on where their true priorities lie.
He likens the situation to an overburdened air traffic control tower. “If the people managing the fleet don’t know which plane to fly, which direction to take off from, and they’re only given one runway, what happens? You get a backlog of planes. Everyone is waiting. And then you park a big plane in front of a small one, and the small one has to wait because there’ll be turbulence.”
He uses aviation analogies throughout his practice because they offer a visceral way to understand systems …read more
Source:: Social Media Explorer
