The Danger of Promotion by Group Size

I just spotted this article on the New York Times about how Google goes about choosing who to hire.  In my own experience, most of it is spot on.  Hiring turns out to be the most important thing you do anywhere, because if you do it wrong, it will completely destroy your company/team -- a bad hire will alienate other good people, drag down velocity and create a toxic atmosphere, not to mention cost you a lot to boot them out.   (My mental definition of "bad hire" vs. "low performer": a bad hire has a negative effect on the group, whereas a low performer has a neutral/zero effect on the group.)

The traits in this article are great for any organization, but they're also extremely rare to find in the right combination -- I doubt I even have half of those traits.  (Chances are someone else is trying to hire them too, I have my own opinion on how to win that battle that I'll keep for another post.)  Most organizations would be tempted to lower their bar to get more people through the door.

The general rarity of people with these kinds of traits and the negative effects of bad hires got me to thinking about how many companies should not reward and promote their employees.  "Wha?  How does this have anything to do with hiring decisions?", you might say.

For many large organizations, seniority / influence / rank / power is determined by the size of the group that one controls, oftentimes, "how many heads do I have reporting to me".  Those with more people reporting to them can make more change happen, are groomed as future senior managers, get more visibility, get paid more, etc.  Maybe you've seen this yourself:  a "to get to the next level, you need to have X people reporting to you and increase your scope", the continuous desire to grow the team more, and the difference between an "individual contributor" and "people manager".

This requirement of build-a-big-team-to-get-promoted breeds danger, because managers are given an incentive to have more people of any nature in their groups so they can progress in their careers, grow their team's influence, and theoretically get more work done (reality tends to the opposite).  This means they're apt to lower the bar for hiring, keep bad hires around longer than necessary, and/or do too many projects, which together have a compounding negative effect that slow things down immensely.  And anyone who has worked in software engineering can tell you what adding more people to a team does for velocity (hint: no bueno).

I have to believe that this was the downfall of some large organization somewhere, and perhaps even many downfalls (one of my favorite books on the topic would probably describe this as "undisciplined pursuit of more").  I'm a fan of keeping teams lean and focused, and saying "no" to unnecessary scope-increasing projects, at the expense of ladder-climbing.  Personally, if I get to be an "individual contributor" forever, I'll consider myself lucky :)

What does this mean for organizations that hire really rare types of people?  It means limits to growth, and even increasing the hiring bar, to keep quality high and speed fast.  It also means finding other ways to promote and retain managers other than by size of their organizations -- like, perhaps, velocity and quality of their teams' work, which would push them to keep their teams small and focused.  The alternative tends to look like what most other really large companies look like: big, slow, unfocused and out-innovated by smaller and nimbler rivals.