I agree that team productivity matters more, and much should be left in the hands of team leads... in addition, that enables diversity and internal "cooperative

I agree that team productivity matters more, and much should be left in the hands of team leads... in addition, that enables diversity and internal "cooperative competition" where different leadership/cooperation styles can be tried and tested and evolved further (potentially different ones in different "niches"). However, to some degree, that's just pushing the KPIs down a level (from Cs to team leads). Which might be a good thing, as team leads/line managers are probably better able to assess individual employee productivity... although AFAIK that's already how it works in most companies, and, well, it doesn't really work that well. > For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down. Yeah, these are certainly good criteria. The benefit is that in such sport, it's probably easier to assess performance/impact, as it's all face time. To some degree, these criteria are applicable to tech work as well ("he's in the office 2 days/week only, but he always solves the problem when the server goes down overnight or over the weekend" or "she works remotely, I never saw her before, but she found 37 critical security bugs in the past year").