Opinion: How people behave at work is just as important as what they achieve, argues Lauren Ryder. Too many organisations measure outcomes while ignoring behaviour
I once worked with a sales team whose top performer was not-so-subtly destroying the business.
His numbers were exceptional. He was flying through his KPIs on the board, but he was also stealing leads from colleagues, bypassing compliance processes to close deals faster and leaving a trail of short-term wins that turned into long-term client churn.
The worst part was that by the time leadership noticed, the damage had been done.
When this kind of story surfaces, our instinct is to blame the metric. And sure, metrics can be wrong. But the deeper problem was that the organisation had handed performance management over to a spreadsheet and called it leadership.
That’s the real KPI crisis. It’s not that we measure the wrong things (though we often do), it’s that we’ve allowed measurement to become a substitute for the harder work of leading people.
The illusion of accountability
Only 38 per cent of Australian organisations maintain a formal, consistent performance management process with clear criteria and regular reviews. Into that vacuum, organisations deploy KPIs as a proxy for management: hit the number, keep your job; miss it, and have an uncomfortable conversation.
Global employee engagement now sits at just 23 per cent, down from 36 per cent in 2020, with 17 per cent of workers actively disengaged, according to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report. Managers are driving much of that decline.
KPIs didn’t cause the disengagement, but a culture that treats KPIs as the ceiling of performance management rather than one tool within it has certainly contributed.
You’re only measuring half the job
The structural flaw at the centre of most KPI frameworks is that they measure outcomes but ignore behaviours.
Back to that salesperson. His revenue numbers were real, but the organisation had no mechanism to capture how he was generating them because behaviour wasn’t part of the framework.
Organisations most commonly cite integrity, teamwork and customer focus as their core values. If leaders had embedded those values in his KPIs through clearly defined behavioural expectations, his performance score would have looked very different.
What does integrity look like in a client conversation? What does teamwork look like when leads are scarce? What does customer focus look like beyond the initial close?
Those questions have specific, observable answers. They just weren’t being asked.
Values should not be a culture poster hung up on a wall. Leaders should translate them into behaviours and assess them alongside outcomes.
An account manager who hits 120 per cent of revenue target while undermining colleagues and cutting corners is not a high performer. A framework that says otherwise is broken.
KPIs are a leadership cop-out
I want to name something that doesn’t get said enough in leadership circles: KPIs have become a way for leaders to avoid leading.
When a team member is underperforming, the hard work is a direct, honest, developmental conversation. It requires a leader who understands the person’s strengths and gaps, can name what’s not working, and knows how to chart a path forward.
KPIs give leaders a way to sidestep that work.
“Gaming” is often a rational response to a system that rewards hitting numbers without examining how they were achieved. But those systems proliferate because they’re easier to administer than real performance leadership.
You don’t have to know your people. You don’t have to have difficult conversations. You just have to report on whether the target was met.
Training leaders to manage performance is not the same as training them to set and measure metrics. A well-designed KPI in the hands of a leader who can’t have a direct conversation is still a broken performance system.
What a real performance framework looks like
With that said, KPIs done well are genuinely valuable.
The organisations that get this right measure outcomes and behaviours together, consistently and without exception.
They also stay disciplined about focus. A performance framework with fifteen KPIs isn’t really a framework. It’s a list of things leadership couldn’t make a decision about.
Five to nine metrics per role is a practical ceiling. If you can’t articulate why each one matters and what action it drives, cut it.
The best-run organisations treat KPIs as hypotheses, not conclusions. If this metric improves, the organisation will be better off. But we must test that hypothesis. Markets shift, roles evolve, and a KPI that was meaningful in January can be actively misleading by October.
But none of that is sufficient without the harder investment: building leaders who actually know how to develop the people they’re responsible for.
Employees want clarity, alignment and visible opportunity for growth. They want to know their work matters and how it connects to something larger than themselves.
The number was never the point
Think back to that salesperson.
The organisation had all the data it needed on the pipeline numbers and the revenue figures.
What it didn’t have was a leader willing to look past the numbers and ask harder questions about what was happening within the team.
That’s the conversation most organisations still aren’t having.
We keep interrogating the framework when we should be interrogating ourselves. Are our leaders capable of developing the people behind the numbers?
Do they know how to have direct, honest conversations about performance, not just how to report on it?
Do they understand that no KPI, however well designed, replaces the capacity to sit across from someone and tell them the truth?
Fix that, and the KPI problem largely resolves itself.
Leave it unaddressed, and you can redesign your measurement framework as many times as you like. The salesperson will still be stealing leads. And the business will keep paying for it long after they’re gone.
Lauren Ryder is the founder and CEO of Leading Edge Global, a leadership consultancy specialising in AI transformation, culture, and organisational capability. She is a regular contributor to Forbes Australia.
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