> many people were promoted for continuing to do their jobs as they understood them
While this link below isn't the best take on this, it does get concrete about the kind of thing you're saying. Each level of management is not doing the prior level better. Each level is doing management quite differently:
OKR really should be used as the North Star and constellations. It usually isn't, though, because people write either task completion percentages or KPIs instead of outcome-supporting qualitative measures that can be undershot or overshot based on priorities and effort allocation (much like SLAs, bad, vs. SLOs, good).
While this link below isn't the best take on this, it does get concrete about the kind of thing you're saying. Each level of management is not doing the prior level better. Each level is doing management quite differently:
https://damuwinston.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/managemen...
// My preferred take on this is "The Leadership Pipeline".