Comment by danpalmer
8 hours ago
It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same.
I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.
Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem.
The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers.
The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team
There's also the executive's incentives, and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone": the payoff for that is very long, and it will be hard for them to take credit, and their own tenure might not be as long as that team's.