Management needs to be careful about achieving targets at all costs

It is understandable that organisations should have performance indicators - measurable goals to work towards. However, by splitting and stacking the indicators further down the hierarchy, an organisation will likely favour managers who tend to focus on reporting up and alienate people who have genuine interest in the organisation goals. 

Being target-driven and people-driven are not mutually exclusive but most humans have natural tendency towards one style or the other. In theory, managers may choose to recruit staff who have a different approach and style from theirs to complement what they lack. In reality, they look for staff whose values are the same as theirs. This leads to the organisation being tipped over in one direction and when it leans too far in the target-oriented direction, customer and staff dissatisfaction will soon emerge.

Management needs to be careful about achieving targets at all costs. It is particularly harmful in hierarchical organisations where multi-levels of managers focus solely on driving their team to deliver against their individual targets with no regards for the overall organisation objectives. When people at the top focus on fragmented deliverables and reward managers whose sole priority is to achieve internal targets and thus creating a target-driving culture, often it is at a cost of losing sight of the big picture.

These middle managers tend to spend more time with their superiors or peers than with their customers or service users and talk more about strategies and policies than goods or service quality. They may claim to internal audiences who might be their next recruiter in a different department to have achieved their job objectives and make a move up their career ladder. However, it is often found that they concentrate their effort on short-term (and often personal) goals, tend to work to the job, have no interest in collaborating with other colleagues (especially where credit might be shared), focus purely on being on the right side of their superiors and fail to develop and promote staff under their charge.

Organisations need to make sure that their top executive, through their strategic goals and implementation plan, maintain the right balance in their decision making as well as making a conscious effort to recruit middle managers from both camps.