> How do you know if you are doing that?

You don't, as an individual "unit", which is part of the problem, i.e. modern management's focus in trying to split teams/big companies down to its "elementary" unit, the employee.

> Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.

And that's why you need good executives, executives who have good guts. You cannot automate your way into being successful, at the end of it all running a company is still pretty much a social endeavour, one that cannot be partitioned down to individual units, neither can its success or failure be explained by those individual units alone.