Are there ever ways leadership can unintentionally impact employee productivity?

We were trying to justify headcount, and then indeed, metrics. I told the team, "I need you to track everything." But I actually conveyed the wrong context. I said, "I need to know how many tickets everybody's doing so that we can get headcount, because we're buried." The issue is that it's great to track that, but we were missing recurring issues and solving underlying problems, the volume was just growing. 

Luckily we had some more senior folks that actually voiced discontent with this, who said, "Look, we're solving the same problems and the junior folks are just crushing it." So we paused, the numbers went down and we evaluated the recurring issues in creative projects, but it took a while for us to realize that. It also took some of the senior folks to actually realize that we were not solving the right problems.

When I was in PC support I was asked to pick the manager job for PC and help desk. So I jumped in right away and started changing and breaking things based on a book I read. I thought, okay, now I know everything about help desks. And I told my team, "I don't want you to stay on the phone too long because then people are on hold and that pisses them off." 

People listened to what I said, not the intent of what I said. And what I said was don't stay on the phone very long, so they got off the phone in three minutes or less, just as I asked. And then our calls boomed, because we weren't fixing anything. 40% of the people that called us had to call us again, because the problems weren't resolved the first time. So we actually exacerbated the problem by doing exactly what I asked for.