How talent destroys your company

Hiring batches of people instead of boosting productivity and investing into the team is the best way to kill a growing company. Prioritisation and letting fires burn are simple survival tools.

LNO Effectiveness Framework

LNO Effectiveness Framework was introduced by Shreyas Doshi . It splits all tasks into three categories:

• Leverage (L) tasks: do a great job.
• Neutral (N) tasks: do a strictly good job, no better.
• Overhead (O) tasks: just get it done, actively try to do a bad job.

With this prioritisation framework you would evaluate all tasks to increase time on leverage tasks while reducing time on overhead tasks. Most professionals do some form of (implicit) prioritisation anyway to complete the highest ROI tasks. Assuming they spend a good amount of time working on the right things (L), what happens to (N) and (O) tasks? There's three paths: do; delegate; avoid.

Useless task pyramid scheme

A crude illustration: director decides to look at some obscure corner of their market on a whim. Who's going to do it? With good constraints they could see the wisdom of avoiding the assessment. But if they have an underling manager they are likely to throw it over to them – it's now a (N) or even (L) task if the manager wants to keep their job and progression. Manager will choose the path of least resistance personally: doing the task if they have the capacity; avoiding the task if they do not; delegating the task if they can.

A manager with no underlings will have to push back on the director from time to time. Soon they will request an underling for themselves to get more done. Before you know it an analyst has joined the team. Now there can be no pushback: every request from director is an important (L) task for the analyst.

So you see how what is useless to one becomes valuable to another. Top leaders looking to delegate (N) and (O) tasks end up creating (L) tasks for their subordinates.

Unconstrained talent = prioritisation slayer

Resource strapped teams have to acknowledge and avoid a lot of tasks. With good focus on (L) tasks they still make progress. Sometimes they become so successful that VCs want to give them money. ??

Thanks to a cash influx all those (N) tasks can finally be completed in the name of building a serious hypergrowth company. With enough money and deficient reasoning powers no task needs to be avoided. What better way to complete the tasks? Hire, hire hire!

Now that we have the money and the growth, how do we decide who to hire? "Let's hire top talent" – said every Twitter thread ever. But the problem with top talent is that they know what they need and they are driven to push for it. They know that every great 300 person company needs a recruitment analytics data scientist or an internal communications and employer branding manager. With so many amazing meetings going on everyone above a certain level gets an assistant or two.

How come all these people don't make the task list shorter? Well, every leader needs to feed their ambition, and what better way than to add projects they are best positioned to complete. Bonus points if the project requires a new hire or new SaaS tool. In short: every task that started out classified as overhead now has one or more people attached.

Culture decays quickly

People too often mistake enthusiasm around a project for its worth, especially if the author is seemingly smart and experienced. As new people join they get an understanding of what a (L) task is in their role. Hiring to complete (N) and (O) company-level tasks means that very fast an increasing proportion of people and time is spent in unhelpful ways.

Yes, larger teams will complete more tasks, but it's the concentration of (L) in completed tasks that is paramount. As this level falls it sets off a vicious cycle of decay. It's irreversible too as once (L) concentration has fallen talent concentration will follow because good people leave, or they start following the new cultural norms of acceptable prioritisation.

How to save yourself?

1. Talent concentration: invest in the team and hire only when it's absolutely necessary
2. Ruthless and clear prioritisation → letting the fires burn