Training managers committed to leading high-performing teams. Entrepreneur | Coach | Writer | Advisor | Speaker | Community of 200K+ leaders.
After helping scale 100+ teams, I've noticed one deadly pattern: The 'More People' Paradox. Here's what it is and how to avoid it... Most teams follow this path: ❌ Problem → ❌ Add People → ❌ More Complexity → ❌ Bigger Problems → ❌ Add More People In their effort to add capacity, They drown themselves in complexity. But elite teams do this: ❌ Problem → ✅ Simplify → ✅ Focus → ✅ Execute → ✅ Scale Ask 3 questions before adding more people: 1️⃣ What could we stop doing? • Nice-to-have projects • Low-impact meetings • Redundant reports 2️⃣ What are we avoiding? • Technology improvements • Difficult conversations • Priority decisions 3️⃣ What are we overcomplicating? • Communication channels • Project workflows • Decision making ✅ Remember: Our optimal path to greater success... Doing half as much, twice as well. If this post resonated with you... 🔔 Please follow Dave Kline for more ♻️ And repost to help others go big by thinking small.
So many teams fall into the trap of more = better. Dave Kline
this is an awesome chart Dave - business need strategies for scaling - I've seen many big companies waste lots of resources over the years
The graphs show it all too well, love this advice, Dave Kline!
It's unfortunately natural, human behavior and it's exacerbated with venture capital. When engineering is going too slowly, it's easy to just hire more people. I have been there with my first startup. We had tech debt and rather than biting the bullet and getting rid of that debt, we hired more people to move faster. The end result was that we just had a larger group of unproductive, unhappy engineers. Fast-forward to my new startup, Bunny, where we don't have any VC money. We recently experienced that merging code started taking longer as our test suite grew in complexity. Sometimes it could take 20 minutes to merge, which resulted in merge collisions, retries and wasted time. So we spent a couple of days redesigning that process and now we can run our tests in a fraction of the time and merge in a few seconds. Everyone is happier and more productive. When you think you need to hire another person, think hard again. And if you still think you need that person, think even harder. Small, focused, super motivated teams can accomplish amazing things. Automate everything. And if you can't automate something, reconsider if it's even worth doing.
A useful thought experiment for managers: "If I had half the humans on the team, what would I do?" The goal here is not to fire people, but to challenge yourself to find how to do more with the people that you already have. Are you 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 ruthless with prioritization? Being ruthless with prioritization is the best way to be supportive of humans.
This as a beautiful graphical representation of what I've seen described so well in the Mythical Man Month - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month. One of the most intriguing solutions to some of the challenges that you describe here is the Holocracy Model - https://www.holacracy.org/ - which decreases overhead and increases autonomy in on the job problem solving, while enabling senior leaders to be interconnected to their organizations in much more organic, non-hierarchical ways. Very cool stuff. Now add to this narrative AI...and WOOF, a whole new world of challenges that we can't yet imagine fully. As we introduce AI agents into the workplace complexity will not likely reduce, although it may feel like it at times. AI might address some of the issues you describe in the 1,2,3 of it all. However even as difficult as it can be to get transparency from human workers, at least we understand their incentive structures and underlying motivations enough to build a supportive transparent culture. The unknown complexity handled by AI in opaque ways that it may not share with it's users will make the risks of our complex world much more challenging to mitigate in the near future.
This was talked about in The Mythical Man Month decades ago. As other commenters have said, management ignores it. You have two interests here: managers want to grow their head count to make them eligible for promotion and bonuses and feed their ego as powerful movers in the organization. You have unscrupulous contractors and consultants wanting to add on to the headcount to milk money from the corporation. Then eventually all this overload without producing a quality outcome, increased revenue or improved processes results in a reduction in force and subsequent poor morale and lost opportunities.
Dave Kline it's a very interesting approach. But let me give you a third approach where you can replace xProblem with xSolution. Why do I think so? Of course, when we deal with something, we focus on it, so let's call it a PROBLEM. But what's interesting is that when people focus on a problem, that problem becomes an even bigger issue for the organization. Instead, people need to focus on SOLUTIONS. At the same time, leaders need to focus on creating MOMENTUM in their organizations while their teams focus on solutions. Let me ask this Dave: Have you ever seen a situation where an organization had strong leaders who created momentum in their team, and even when they faced a huge problem, it wasn’t a major issue? They had a solution right away because of that momentum. While some people focused on solving the issue, the rest of the team kept their eyes on the bigger picture for the organization’s future. I’ve seen this happen many times. And what I know is that when your entire team is inspired by where they’re going, proud of what they’re doing, and aligned with their purpose, even a major problem doesn’t seem visible. Why? Because they fix it right away! Just my two cents! 😊 What do you think?
Training managers committed to leading high-performing teams. Entrepreneur | Coach | Writer | Advisor | Speaker | Community of 200K+ leaders.
1w📌 The 7 Deadly Sins of New Managers Adding as a first resort isn't the only common mistake new managers make. Here are 7 of the most common ones: https://mgmt.beehiiv.com/p/7-deadly-sins-of-a-new-manager-plus-tips-to-avoid-them