If you have management failing to communicate business needs they'll make everyone beneath them look just as bad if not worse.
At the end of the day there's nothing naive about doing a good job. If you have any employees focusing too much on metrics, but especially your management, they're incompetent dead weight.
Doing a good job is simply less work for everyone, but it starts from the top down.
To clarify: each month measure a real business need. The trick here is that there are many needs, and the selection must be random each month.
Take a service like Google search as an example: if the number of searches per month is the consistent KPI for the tech team, then they’re incentivised to sacrifice customer satisfaction by returning junk results so that users are forced to do multiple searches to find what they want.
But if they’re only rewarded for the increased search volume the one time, the next month the metric might be customer satisfaction instead and they’ll be penalised for cheating in this manner.
The key aspect is not repeating metrics — but the metrics should be valid.
At the end of the day there's nothing naive about doing a good job. If you have any employees focusing too much on metrics, but especially your management, they're incompetent dead weight.
Doing a good job is simply less work for everyone, but it starts from the top down.