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 thinking and organizational flow. The point is clear: if leaders can’t prioritize and communicate clearly, their managers can’t execute effectively.

“The judgment comes fast,” he adds. “You’re asked, ‘Why haven’t you taken off yet?’ But no one stops to see that there’s a triple-seven flying right in front of you.”

The KPI no one owns

In Veejay’s work, one of the most common breakdowns is ownership. KPIs become disconnected from the reality of daily work, and when they don’t reflect what employees actually do or can do, they become meaningless.

“We see team members saying, ‘I’ve done my job. I’m waiting for someone else to finish theirs.’ That’s not collaboration. That’s leakage,” he says. “Their KPIs were set that way. So they didn’t feel like part of a team; they just completed a task.”

He calls this an “energy leak”: a moment when capability, insight, or initiative is withheld because someone doesn’t feel accountable for the broader goal.

“If you give someone a target and say, ‘That’s your job,’ they won’t step outside of it. Even if they can help. Even if they have insight.”

For Veejay, a truly high-performing team behaves differently. The engineer doesn’t just write code. The ops person doesn’t just monitor dashboards. Everyone is aligned around a shared objective and empowered to contribute across silos.

“If we say the team’s goal is to grow the customer base by 3x, then everyone shares it. Not from their function, but as a team. That’s what real ownership looks like.”

Refurbishing the corporate aircraft

This shift from individual KPIs to team-level ownership requires structural change. And that, he says, is where most companies resist.

“You want to fly from Singapore to New York, but your plane is still a 737. No one’s going to sit in an economy seat for 18 hours without comfort. You need to refurbish the plane.”

In his analogy, the aircraft is the company’s internal operating system—its structures, processes, and ways of measuring performance. You can’t expect long-haul performance with short-haul infrastructure.

“We all want to fly far, fast, but we’re not asking if our plane is ready. Is it equipped? Is the crew trained? Are the KPIs designed for that journey? Most of the time, they’re not.”

The implication: KPI reform is about reengineering how teams are structured, how success is defined, and how accountability is shared.

Clarity in the middle: A systemic fix

At Oulbyz, Veejay Madhavan starts every engagement the same way: with a discovery conversation.

“We ask one thing: if you could fix just one or two things, what would they be to level up your organization?”

From there, the process unfolds into alignment workshops, capability assessments, and something he calls the “clarity workshop.” The goal is to detect where instructions are breaking down and why managers aren’t translating strategy into execution.

“Sometimes it’s not a skill problem,” he explains. “HR and vendors do a good job on that. The issue is people don’t even know what they’re supposed to focus on.”

He recalls a client engagement where middle managers were juggling ten simultaneous priorities with no guidance. “All they hear is urgent, urgent, urgent. But when everything’s urgent, it means nothing is.”

That’s when he steps in: to recalibrate not just the team, but the leadership above them.

“We help them ask the basic question: ‘Which three things matter most right now?’ Because if you don’t ask, you’re flying blind.”

Sometimes, the answer reveals a more uncomfortable truth.

“There are times we walk away,” he says. “We’ve told clients, ‘Your issue isn’t with the team. It’s with you.'”

‘Stop outsourcing clarity’

In Veejay’s view, the KPI crisis isn’t just about metrics. It’s about ownership of meaning.

“If your people don’t even know who they are, how can they know what they’re supposed to do?”

To fix the problem, companies need more than smarter spreadsheets. They need honesty, alignment, and leaders willing to prioritize clarity over control.

“We are not a band-aid. We are a mirror. We show you what you’ve patched over, and what’s festering underneath. Whether you act on it or not is up to you.”

In an age obsessed with performance, Veejay Madhavan’s message is quietly radical: clarity is the core infrastructure for everything else.

For more insights from Veejay Madhavan and his work, follow him on LinkedIn and Medium.

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