Calibre over Capacity

I was in charge of 200 people in my last programme. I managed to grow the team from 8 to 200 in under five months.

"Wow, that's impressive. What was the programme?"

"Well it was a highly complex and sophisticated modification and transformation of verbiage across the leading global customer portal touching on all the major operational and logistical elements for data transfer from the business to customers."

"Double wow, what does that mean?"

"Well because it wasn't 2025 anymore we had to change the copyright date on 40 pages on the website."

B-players treat headcount as a badge of honour. Not velocity, not meeting deadlines, just the number of people, i.e. 10 is better than 5, 100 is better than 50, 1000 is better than 500. As well as the badge of honour there is a practical reason for increasing headcount, it means that you have far more people that can be "sacrificed" in the inevitable failure before your cell of sub-A-players is threatened.

Parkinson's law of subordinates states that "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals", another law is "Officials make work for each other." This matches the behaviour of B-players perfectly.

The following are phrases and language that you most likely recognise from management meetings where B-players are on the drive for increasing headcount.

"We just can't meet the deadline with our current capacity. I really need some more mid-level resources."

"You're asking me to deliver more and yet we're already under-resourced. The teams are saying they need more junior resources."

"In order to meet the new challenges we are going to have to work in parallel and that means I need more people."

The A-player playbook. Headcount is essentially operational drag, not an asset. Shift away from capacity to calibre. Leverage versus babysitting.

"If we add five mid-level resources it's going to increase our coordination overhead and communication tax. Instead I would like to allocate that same budget to hire one high-velocity peer who can own and execute this vertical independently."

"If I hire three mid-level resources, my focus shifts from the objective to managing internal task lists. If we hire a peer-level operator my leverage doubles on day one because they require zero hand holding. We are paying for execution, not management overhead."

The rationale for hiring less but higher calibre is also surprisingly clear to justify.

Higher number of mid-level resources: number of resources x (salary + hiring fees + onboarding / training lag) + increased headcount leading to more complex processes, communication overhead, less clear ownership and accountability.

When pushed on the high hiring fees and onboarding lag of their proposed army, B-players will deploy their final trick:

"I can bypass the recruitment fees. I know three or four people from my last gig who can jump straight in next week."

Do not fall for this. While it bypasses the immediate hiring fees it actively accelerates the rot by bypassing any level of scrutiny on the quality of the resources.

Instead of building a high-velocity team, the B-player is fast-tracking the construction of their own protective bunker, importing a pre-assembled cell of sub-A-players who owe their loyalty to the manager, not the mission. You still pay the onboarding tax, but now you have also institutionalised mediocrity, effectively paying a premium to subsidise your own operational drag.

Although the phrase is used in other subject domains, in these situations calibre really does win over capacity!

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