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Keep People In-Charge

We usually hear KPI and think Key Performance Indicator. Revenue, growth, margin, market share, productivity, conversion, cost, timelines, every organisation has its numbers. Numbers make business easier to talk about. They give everyone something concrete to point at and, sometimes, a comforting sense of control.

I’ve spent more than two decades working across law, investment banking and retail. I started in a law firm, moved into investment banking, and eventually into retail, where my work has grown from legal and real estate into business development, expansion and strategy. The industries were very different, and so were the ways performance got measured in each one. But one thing stayed remarkably consistent across all of them: people pay attention to whatever the organisation pays attention to.

That’s why I’ve started reading KPI a little differently. It can still mean Key Performance Indicator. But maybe it can also mean Keep People In-Charge.

Not in the sense that everyone should decide everything, that would just be chaos. It means people should be genuinely responsible for the outcomes they’re expected to deliver, and if we actually want ownership from someone, a target on its own isn’t enough. They need context, some real authority, and enough freedom to make decisions. Otherwise you end up with a strange, fairly common situation: someone held accountable for an outcome they never really had the power to influence.

Why KPIs Go Wrong

KPIs are genuinely useful. Without some form of measurement, it’s hard to know whether you’re making progress at all. The trouble starts when the number becomes more important than whatever it was originally meant to represent.

A salesperson measured on sales will focus on sales. A team measured on speed will focus on speed. A project measured on a deadline will focus on hitting that date. None of this is inherently bad, it’s just a natural response to whatever gets measured. I’ve watched this play out often enough across three fairly different industries to stop being surprised by it.

There’s actually a name for this, and it goes back further than most people assume. The economist Charles Goodhart first made the point in 1975, writing about UK monetary policy, but it was the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern who gave it the line everyone actually quotes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Once people know exactly what’s being counted, they start managing the count itself, not necessarily the thing the count was ever meant to represent. Which is exactly why the design of a KPI matters as much as the KPI itself.

The Way You Hit the Number Matters Too

This gets more important once ethics enters the picture. My years in law taught me to look not just at the outcome, but at how it was reached. A target hit by creating genuine value is a different thing from one hit by quietly compromising the principles the business is supposed to stand for. A cost saving from cutting real waste is different from a saving that just moves the same problem somewhere less visible. A project delivered on time through good planning is different from one that hit the date by quietly cutting quality.

A number can tell you someone succeeded. It can’t always tell you whether they succeeded the right way.

Wells Fargo is the example that comes up most often when people talk about this going badly wrong, and for good reason. Branch staff were given aggressive cross-selling targets, and when the targets proved unreachable honestly, thousands of employees opened millions of accounts customers never asked for, just to hit the number. By the time it became public in 2016, the bank had paid out enormous fines and let go of thousands of staff, and its reputation took years to recover. Nobody at the top explicitly told anyone to commit fraud. The target itself did most of the talking. It’s the clearest real-world case I know of Goodhart’s Law actually costing a company its name.

That’s part of why I think KPIs need to stay connected to values. If an organisation says it cares about customers, its measures should reflect more than sales alone. If it says it develops people, performance reviews should account for that development. If sustainability is genuinely part of the purpose, it needs a place in how projects actually get evaluated. There has to be some real connection between what an organisation says it values and what it actually chooses to measure.

Purpose First, Then the KPI

For me, the order matters a lot here. Purpose comes first, then values, then strategy, then KPIs, then behaviour, and only then outcomes. Purpose tells you where you’re trying to go. Values tell you how you want to get there. Strategy tells you what to focus on. KPIs help you understand whether you’re actually making progress along that path.

Start with the KPI instead, and you risk letting the number quietly define the objective, rather than the objective defining the number. A good KPI, in that sense, should make you ask a better question: what behaviour am I actually creating by choosing to measure this particular thing?

No Project Belongs to One Function Alone

My current work in retail has reinforced how important it is to look past any single function. Real estate, legal, construction, architecture, procurement, asset management, data, geomarketing, business development, each brings a different lens to the same business outcome, and that variety is genuinely valuable. It also means a project rarely belongs to one team alone. One group owns the commercial terms, another owns risk, another construction, another operations. Everyone has a role, but the final result is shared.

The project doesn’t care which department hit its own KPI. It cares whether the thing actually worked.

That’s why individual and functional KPIs need to sit alongside shared outcomes, not instead of them. We need people accountable for their own piece, but we also need everyone to understand what the group is actually trying to achieve together. The longer I’ve worked across functions, the more I’ve come to appreciate this balance. A decision that looks excellent from one seat can carry real costs somewhere else down the line. A commercially attractive call might have operational consequences nobody flagged. A technically efficient solution might need a completely different commercial approach to actually work. More often than not, the answer gets better once different perspectives are actually in the room together.

Ownership Needs Authority, Not Just Responsibility

This connects directly to ownership. You can’t genuinely hold someone accountable for something they have no real ability to influence. If a person owns a project on paper but can’t make any of the decisions that shape it, that ownership is incomplete. If a manager is held responsible for a team’s performance but has no say in developing people or making calls, that accountability is incomplete too. Responsibility without authority isn’t ownership. It’s just frustration with extra steps.

This isn’t only something I’ve noticed anecdotally. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan spent decades building what’s now called self-determination theory, and one of their core findings is that autonomy, having some real say over your own work, is one of just three basic psychological needs that drive motivation, alongside competence and connection to other people. Take autonomy away, and motivation tends to erode even when the pay and the targets stay exactly the same. Daniel Pink picked up the same research years later in his book Drive and made a version of the same case for a business audience: once people are paid fairly, what actually motivates them is autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose, not a bigger number on a dashboard. It’s the kind of thing that sounds obvious once you’ve seen it happen on your own team, and considerably less obvious before you have.

That’s really why I like this second reading of KPI. People need to know what they own. They need to understand why it matters. They need enough authority to actually act on it. And only then does it make sense to hold them accountable for the outcome.

There’s a harder part of this for anyone leading a team, though. If you genuinely put people in charge, you have to actually let them decide. They’ll sometimes choose a different route than you would have. They’ll make mistakes along the way. That’s simply part of how people develop.

Teaching People to Think, Not Just to Do

Building and mentoring teams has taught me this over and over, sometimes the hard way. It’s tempting to become the person with all the answers, someone brings you a problem, you solve it, everyone moves on, and it genuinely feels efficient in the moment. I fell into that habit myself more than once before I noticed what it was actually costing the team. But the far more valuable outcome is watching people start thinking for themselves. Don’t teach people how to do the job. Teach them how to think about the job. That’s the difference between developing leaders and just collecting followers.

Numbers Give You a Signal. People Give You Context.

My time in investment banking gave me a real appreciation for the discipline numbers bring to decision-making. They force you to test assumptions, compare alternatives, actually choose between options instead of going with a gut feeling. But a number is still a representation of reality, not reality itself. A forecast is built on assumptions about customers, markets, timing, behaviour, and the moment those assumptions shift, the forecast quietly stops being true. Over time I’ve learned to look at the number, and then look past it.

The same logic applies to KPIs. A dashboard can tell you that something is happening. It can’t always tell you why.

Retail makes this especially visible, and it’s probably the clearest example from my own day-to-day work. Footfall, conversion, average transaction value, turnover, productivity, market share, these tell you a great deal on their own. But the people closest to the business add something no dashboard can, which is context. Two stores can post nearly identical numbers and have completely different stories behind them: different customer profiles, different competitive pressure, different local conditions, teams behaving in genuinely different ways. The number gives you a signal. People give you the reason behind it. Good decisions usually need both.

Key Performance Indicator, or Keep People In-Charge

Maybe that’s what I like about this second reading of KPI. Key Performance Indicator asks what we’re measuring. Keep People In-Charge asks who actually owns it. And underneath both sits a bigger question worth asking first: why does any of this matter in the first place?

When the purpose is clear, the values are clear, and people have genuine ownership, KPIs stop being just a way of judging people after the fact and start being a way of helping them make better decisions along the way. The best organisations aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated dashboards. They’re the ones where people understand the outcome, have the authority to act on it, and actually feel responsible for what happens next. That builds something more durable than compliance. It builds ownership.

The longer I work, the less I believe leadership is about having all the answers, and the more I believe it’s about building an environment where other people can find them. A good KPI should create focus without creating silos, accountability without removing judgement, performance without compromising ethics, and it should stay aligned with purpose and values throughout. Most importantly, it should put the people closest to the work in a real position to influence the outcome, rather than just report on it afterward.

Give people a number with no context, and you get compliance. Give them responsibility with no authority, and you get frustration. Give them authority with no accountability, and you get chaos. But give people purpose, context, authority and accountability together, and something different tends to happen. They take ownership.

Maybe that’s the better way to read KPI. Not only Key Performance Indicator. Also, Keep People In-Charge. Because in the end, businesses don’t deliver numbers. People do.

Related reading: Building a Business vs Building an Institution