The Headcount Trap
Career harvesters—individuals who are skilled at navigating corporate politics and presenting a facade of progress, but who fail to deliver tangible results
The most destructive game in business isn't played in boardrooms or on strategy sessions - it's played when you build your career maps for senior folks. The rules are simple: grow your team, grow your career. The consequences are devastating: bloated organisations where value creation becomes secondary to empire building.
This isn't a story about lazy employees or incompetent managers. It's about what happens when you reward the wrong behavior at scale. When headcount becomes the primary signal of importance, rational actors will optimise for headcount, even when it destroys the very value they're supposed to create.
Consider a typical scenario: David manages a customer acquisition team. Instead of figuring out how to actually acquire customers more efficiently, he spots an opportunity in the org chart. He proposes splitting his function into three teams: "Customer Acquisition," "User Growth," and "Customer Engagement." Each team will focus on "different" metrics - acquisition cost, activation rate, and retention rate. Each needs a manager, analysts, and engineers. David gets promoted to Director of Growth, overseeing all three teams.
On paper, this looks like sophisticated thinking. In reality, it's sophisticated waste. The three teams will spend most of their time coordinating with each other, fighting over resources, and optimizing for their individual metrics rather than the actual business goal: getting more customers to use the product successfully.
David isn't evil or incompetent. He's responding rationally to the incentives around him. The company rewards empire building, so he builds an empire. The tragedy is that he's probably capable of real value creation - but the system pushes him toward complexity instead of results.
This pattern repeats because humans naturally choose the path of least resistance. Fighting for territory is easier than creating new territory. Saying "give me more people" is simpler than saying "let me build something that didn't exist before."
Like children squabbling over toys, managers default to zero-sum thinking: if I can overlook Sarah's team, I win. If I can expand my domain to overlap with Tom's, I'm more important.
But this is fundamentally backward. The most valuable people in any organization are those who create positive-sum opportunities - new revenue streams, new efficiencies, new capabilities that didn't exist before. The second most valuable are those who eliminate negative-sum activities - the bloat, the redundancy, the busy work that accumulated over time.
What if promotion to Director or above required one of two achievements: either you build a new revenue stream, or you eliminate organisational bloat while maintaining output?
No more promotions for just existing and accumulating people. No more rewards for splitting one team into three. No more empire building disguised as strategic thinking.
Would this change anything? Suddenly, the path to earn more requires deep understanding of the business, not just political skill. You either have to spot opportunities that others missed, or you have to be brave enough to cut through the complexity that others created. Both require real competence. Both create genuine value.
The game will always exist. However who will win? Companies that reward builders and simplifiers or those that reward empire builders and complicators. The math I think is simple, even if the execution is slightly painful but not that complicated.