When hiring five people creates thirty-five problems 

The first sign isn’t chaos. It’s that your best person got slower.

Not worse. Slower. Same quality, takes longer to get there, and they can’t quite explain why. Ask them, and you’ll get some vague reply about meetings.

Here’s what’s actually happening: they’re not doing more work. They’re doing more explaining.

When your headcount doubles,  the work doesn’t double…the connections between people do.  

Three things break, in this order

“Ask someone” stops working. With five people, everybody knows who knows. Make it twelve, and now you have a problem. The new people don’t have a lay of the land yet, so they ask the one person they know. The knowledge is still there. The way to get it isn’t. 

Decisions stall because nobody ever named who decides. At small size, decision rights are obvious: there’s one person, and it’s usually you. At 2x, three people each assume one of the other two is handling it. Now we are in full-blown bystander effect. Nothing gets done… it just sits waiting.

Your doers become managers overnight, and no one noticed. Your strongest person had three informal reports. Now they have eight, plus a title that hasn’t changed and no training that ever happened. You didn’t promote them into management. Headcount did.

None of these is a people problem. All three are systems your team outgrew and never rebuilt.

Ask your newest hire one question

Book a meeting (or send an email) and ask the last person who joined your team the following question:

“What took you longest to figure out that nobody told you?”

Their answer is your most expensive undocumented process. Not a guess, the real one. And only a recent hire can see it, because everyone else is already on autopilot. They are too close to the work to see where it’s broken.

After you get the answer, you have two pieces of homework. 

Assign them a task to write down the process. Not you. One page, in their words, while it’s still fresh. The person who just learned it can explain it better than the person who’s known it for four years.

Name the decider on your three most common recurring decisions. Hiring approvals, scope changes, spend over some threshold, whatever comes up monthly. One name next to each. Not a committee, not a process. A name. Most stalled decisions in a growing org aren’t disagreements. They’re vacancies.

That’s it: one page and three names. You can do both before the end of next week.

Before you close this

Ask your newest hire the question this week, then hit reply and tell me what they said. I collect these; the answers are more similar across organizations than anybody expects, and that similarity is the whole argument for writing things down.

— Georgie-Ann, Your Ops Bestie