Leaders often react to team burnout by hiring more people. However, this is often a symptom of broken systems, not a true headcount issue. Adding staff without fixing underlying processes leads to a bloated, inefficient, and expensive team.
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Exceptional people in flawed systems will produce subpar results. Before focusing on individual performance, leaders must ensure the underlying systems are reliable and resilient. As shown by the Southwest Airlines software meltdown, blaming employees for systemic failures masks the root cause and prevents meaningful improvement.
Intentionally assigning fewer people to a project than seems necessary forces extreme focus on the highest priorities. Overstaffing is "poison" because it breeds politics, encourages work on non-essential tasks, and creates cruft that slows the entire company down.
When founders claim a proven but labor-intensive channel 'doesn't scale,' they often misdiagnose a resourcing problem. The bottleneck isn't the channel's viability but their inability to solve the operational challenge of hiring, training, and managing a team to execute that channel at massive volume.
Scaling a team is not a linear process. Each time a company's number of employees doubles (e.g., from 5 to 10, then to 20), its operational structure, processes, and even strategy must be completely re-evaluated. This forces a difficult transition from generalized roles to specialized functions.
If hiring more people isn't increasing output, it's likely because you're adding 'ammunition' (individual contributors) without adding 'barrels' (the key people or projects that enable work). To scale effectively, you must increase the number of independent workstreams, not just the headcount within them.
According to the 'dark side' of Metcalfe's Law, each new team member exponentially increases the number of communication channels. This hidden cost of complexity often outweighs the added capacity, leading to more miscommunication and lost information. Improving operational efficiency is often a better first step than hiring.
The paradigm has shifted from linear scaling (more people equals more revenue) to efficiency-driven growth. Leaders who still use "I don't have enough headcount" as an excuse for missing targets are operating with an obsolete model and hindering progress in the AI era.
Many leaders hire ops personnel to "clean up the mess." However, without a strategic mandate to fix the root data architecture, these hires often get stuck in a perpetual cycle of data cleanup, reinforcing the broken, legacy system they were brought in to solve.
Getting approval for an operations hire is difficult because they aren't directly tied to new revenue. Instead of a vague promise of "efficiency," build a business case by quantifying the cost of a broken process—like a high lead disqualification rate—and show how the hire will unlock that hidden pipeline.
Top talent isn't attracted to chaos; they are attracted to well-run systems where they can have a massive impact. Instead of trying to "hire rockstars" to fix a broken system, focus on building a systematic, efficient company. This is the kind of environment the best people want to join.
