That's a really insightful thing to say. Makes sense given my personal experience of bureaucracies.

And we have many bureaucrats as leaders, but leaders need not be bureaucrats and outside of a very small number of situations you probably don't want them to be either because just as you say, they're busy trying to get the results they know they're supposed to get and show the people who need to see it that they got that result. Contrast another kind of leader which may have a plan or a vision to go beyond benchmarks, or yet another kind of leader who can help get the best out of their people in ways you might not be able to measure using a microcaliper.