You can grow headcount and still shrink output. The fastest way to do that is to assign your best people to every important project at once. It feels rational. You want institutional memory in the room, you want the A players on the hardest problems, and you want to show the board that every priority has coverage. What you get instead is delay that hides inside calendars, status updates that sound competent while nothing ships, and a culture that normalizes partial attention as a virtue. The Risks of Putting People on Too Many Project Teams is not an HR talking point. It is a systems problem that compounds with every additional stakeholder and meeting invite.
The pressure comes from everywhere. Sales wants a feature for a key account, marketing needs a launch narrative by quarter end, security has an audit window, and operations is trying to standardize a messy workflow that started as a hack. Leaders respond with allocation, not sequence. They place the same engineer, PM, or designer across four or five teams so each lane can say it has the right talent. The plan looks inclusive. The execution falls apart because work does not respect slices of attention. Complex tasks resist fragmentation. Every context switch restarts a hidden setup phase that steals minutes and then hours. Multiply that by a week and the calendar fills while value creation stalls.
Where the system breaks first is not code or copy. It is ownership. When a person belongs to many teams at once, that person becomes a roaming consultant instead of an accountable operator. Decisions drift into group consensus because no one wants to block another team’s deadline. The roadmaps fill with hedges. You start to see soft commitments like “targeting end of month” instead of hard commitments like “build complete on Wednesday, test Thursday, deploy Friday.” The most capable people become the least available ones, which means the teams that need them start to design around their absence. Design arounds become the real process. This is how a portfolio of initiatives turns into a portfolio of partials.
The second failure point is coordination load. Every extra team assignment adds a new weekly ceremony, a new chat channel, a new document with its own taxonomy. Meetings begin to exist just to keep the meetings aligned. Leaders try to fix it with more visibility. They roll up tasks into cross team trackers and require more detailed updates. That feels responsible. It also adds another hour of preparation for meetings that still cannot make real tradeoffs, since no one in the room controls the dependencies end to end. You can tell you are here when the most common sentence in a standup is “blocked, waiting on X,” and X changes every week.
There is also a math problem that most organizations refuse to do. Capacity is not additive at the margins. A person at 180 percent allocation is not delivering 1.8 times their baseline. They are probably delivering half. The queueing theory version is straightforward. As utilization approaches 100 percent, cycle time rises nonlinearly. In plain English, when you stuff a system, even a small disturbance creates long delays. Real work behaves like that. The setup time for deep tasks keeps resetting each time you switch context. The reset looks invisible because it lives inside a brain, not a ticket. The result is a week that feels full and a quarter that looks empty.
False positive metrics keep this pattern alive. Leadership sees a high participation rate and reads it as engagement. They see lots of active projects and read it as momentum. They see clocked hours and read them as effort. None of those indicators track value. The better question is repeat value creation per person per segment. Who shipped something that changed a user’s behavior, reduced an incident class, or removed a step from a sales motion. If that number is flat while meetings expand, you are paying the coordination tax and calling it collaboration.
The human cost shows up next. Talented people can carry a few heavy lifts when the mission is clear. They cannot carry ten at once without losing the sense that any of them matters. Fatigue arrives disguised as professionalism. People hit every meeting and miss every moment where a real decision could be made. You will hear more language about alignment and less language about ownership. Once that language shift happens, speed does not return with a pep talk. It returns when people get one or two real promises to keep and the power to keep them.
Fixing this is not a culture campaign. It is a design change. Start by moving from allocation math to flow math. Instead of asking who can be added to a project, ask what sequence reduces cycle time for the business as a whole. Choose finishes over starts. If you can finish a revenue critical feature in seven focused days, you do that before you open two new exploratory threads that will live forever. The habit to build is closure. Every finished thing frees attention. Every new thing taxes it.
Next, set a hard limit on simultaneous team memberships for core operators. A simple rule is three or fewer. One primary team where the person owns a deliverable from idea to live, one enabling team where the person provides a well scoped contribution with a clear end state, and one advisory lane with a defined cadence that the person can skip without penalty. Anything beyond that requires an executive to approve a trade: if you add a team, you remove a team. The point is to force real prioritization and to make the cost of new commitments visible.
Rebuild ownership so there is no confusion about who makes what decision. Replace broad committees with tight owner rooms. If a PM and an engineering lead are the real deciders for a feature, put them in a two person decision loop and empower them to say no to work that creates new dependencies without capacity. Stakeholders can be informed, not involved, until the moment a decision needs escalation. This sounds less inclusive. It is more honest. Inclusion that prevents delivery is not inclusion. It is avoidance in a nicer outfit.
Shorten feedback loops so that progress becomes visible in days, not months. Teams that work across many projects default to long arcs and large review forums because it takes time to coordinate many calendars. Break that. Pick a weekly integration day. On that day, code merges, copy lands in the environment where it will live, and operations tests run in conditions that look like production. If something misses the integration window, it waits for the next one. This cadence pulls work forward and exposes slippage early. It also teaches teams that real progress is integration, not activity.
Protect energy with structural guardrails. The calendar is a system, not a suggestion. Block two deep work windows per day for core builders and enforce no meeting hours across the company. Put a cost on meetings by requiring a decision owner, a document that states the decision to be made, and a time bound conclusion. If a meeting fails to produce a decision, it loses its slot the next week. People learn quickly to combine information, make a call, and move on. That is the point.
Finally, replace status theater with operational truth. Move your principal metric away from participation counts and toward cycle time to value, with quality gates that matter in your business. If you sell software, measure the days from commit to user impact with a threshold for defect rates. If you run a services business, measure the days from proposal to first dollar collected with a threshold for customer satisfaction. Report that number by team and by quarter. When that metric becomes public, the number of parallel projects tends to drop on its own. Leaders learn to stop adding work that they cannot finish, because the scoreboard turns that behavior into visible drag.
This approach will feel narrower. That is the idea. Focus is a constraint that creates speed. Clear ownership is a constraint that creates accountability. Sequence is a constraint that creates flow. Without these constraints, organizations default to adding projects and people to signal ambition. That signal reads well in slides. It reads poorly in the market when deadlines slip, customers wait, and teams lose confidence.
The fix is within reach for any company that is willing to trade the appearance of coverage for the reality of delivery. Start work later. Finish work sooner. Give fewer people more complete ownership. Put a real price on coordination. Build rituals that pull value forward in days, not months. The reward is the only metric that actually compounds inside a company. Trust that when you say you will ship on Friday, you will. That trust does not come from busier calendars. It comes from a system that refuses to spread the same people across everything important and then call it strategy.
If you are already in the trap, pick one mission critical project and prove the point. Remove every extra assignment from the two people who can unblock it. Clear their calendars, collapse decision rights, and set a near term finish line that creates visible customer value. Ship it. Tell that story internally. You will not need a memo after that. The people doing the work will ask for the same conditions on their next project, and the people who manage portfolios will start to plan in sequence because the evidence will be impossible to ignore.
Most founders do not need more people. They need fewer parallel promises and tighter ownership. That is how you restore speed without raising burn. That is how you scale credibility without pretending that attendance equals impact. And that is how you turn a busy company back into a building company.
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