> And yeah, it's stupid, and it makes the problem worse. It's the reason nonetheless.
While that's true, it's also a difficult problem to solve. In tiny organizations like startups where the CEO personally knows everyone and what they do, it's easy.
But as soon as you grow beyond that (and I've been in a number of startups that cross that gap), how do you objectively but fairly handle this? There is no easy answer.
You could go with fully empowering all managers to do as they wish. Trust them to hire, fire and promote correctly. This is great, until you hire some bad managers. And as you grow, it is 100% guaranteed at some point you'll hire bad managers. So then they ruin it for everyone, hiring and promoting their buddies.
And that's how you end up with more objective metrics. Take away some of that freedom, make everyone measure and justify actions based on metrics. It's terrible, but probably better than the alternative.
The upper managers do that because they think the lower ones are lying or incompetent. A traceable process doesn't lie.
And yeah, it's stupid, and it makes the problem worse. It's the reason nonetheless.