How to grow your organisation
How ambition pushes us towards the least useful approach and what we can do better
I remember sitting in my first round of Facebook interviews and being asked what I enjoyed about management. My answer was “I love growing teams” and the response I got back told me more about them than it did about me. “It’s not just about hiring”. This wasn’t what I meant at all, but thanks for checking. However, when managers are looking to tackle larger problems then hiring is the first lever they look to pull.
There’s a reason for this. Organisation size is seen as a proxy for seniority. At Google (and other places) I’ve seen senior people base their entire promotion strategy on this kind of land grab. Funnily, they were the people too busy to do the actual grunt work of doing interviews, hiring committees or spending time building relationships with Google’s outstanding recruiting teams to ensure suitable candidates are coming through. The downside of this way of thinking is that you wake up one day and thousands of people lose their job through no fault of their own because you’ve over-hired. This kind of thinking will eventually result in your organisation collapsing under its own weight.
Despite it being the most obvious answer, hiring more people can only, at best, bring your incremental growth in capability. If we, for a moment, assume that all…
