Bear Essentials: "We Just Need More People" Is Almost Never the Answer

Perception

You’re short-staffed, or at least it feels that way. The team is overwhelmed by the seemingly never-ending requests from across the organization, and the fix seems obvious: add headcount. Hire more writers and producers. Just two more FTEs would make the world of difference. 

Reality

You're not understaffed, you’ve just got the team huddled around the wrong work efforts. 

I’ve had this exact conversation three times in the last month. And in each of these cases, digging into the reality of what’s happening (not just team feedback), the problem wasn't the team’s size; it was how the work was distributed among them. 

Similarly, your team is likely organized around a version of marketing that stopped existing a while ago, and no number of new hires is going to fix the antiquated structure problem. You just get more people doing unclear work faster.

Why It Matters

• More people working inside an unclear structure just means more coordination overhead, not more output.
• The roles you're hiring for are often the roles you needed three years ago, not the ones you need now.
• Every hire you make to patch a structural gap is a hire you can't make to build the capability you really need.

What Most Teams Get Wrong

1. Treating headcount as the first lever to pull instead of the last one.
2. Backfilling old roles on autopilot instead of asking whether that role should still exist.
3. Confusing "the team is overwhelmed" with "the team is too small" when the problem is usually "the work is badly organized".

What to Do Instead 

1. Map out the actual process (not the pretty one on file that is never referenced) and find where the work consistently breaks down. It's usually a handoff, a decision nobody owns, or a workflow with no off-ramp, not a missing person. 
2. Audit your current roles against what the team really needs today. Some of what you're staffed for likely shouldn't exist anymore.
3. THEN write the job description that starts filling the gaps.

Fix the structure first, then hire into it. A clear operating model tells you which roles you need, and which ones you were about to hire by habit.

Try this with your team: Next time someone says "we need more people”, ask them where exactly that extra body will “fix” a problem. The actual bottleneck that another headcount will solve for. It's usually a governance issue; an unassigned handoff or an unowned decision, not a headcount gap. Fix that first and see if you still need the new hire.

Seventh Bear's Take

Throwing more people is an expensive way to solve a problem that usually isn't a people problem. Fix the structure, governance, and process, and you'll be shocked how much capacity you already had but couldn’t access because of legacy baggage. If you just add people to the team in the same old roles, you'll be having this same conversation next year, just with a bigger team and a bigger budget.

Deeper Dive

Want more on this topic? Check out: Bear Essentials: The Role Nobody's Hiring For Is The One That Matters Most