More is better – right? Wrong.
In today’s hyperactive consumption economy, its easy to believe that. After all, we are bombarded with ads for nearly everything. Not too long ago, I was a adamant follower of the more is better doctrine. I wanted to try everything. From a consumer standpoint, this was never necessarily a bad thing. The problem, however, was that this doctrine didn’t stop at consumerism. It was brought to the workplace.
The idea that more is better is dangerous in the workplace. Late last year, my digital agency Boucher + Co., was preparing to move to a new office space in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. This was an exciting time for us, and we sought to expand the company in many ways simultaneously. At first glance, this did not seem like much more than daunting problem. We had the cash flow, the manpower, and the space to complete our company to-do list. We were good to go.
Shortly after we moved into our new offices and were settled in, several team members pitched me the idea of hiring extra staff to handle what would surely be a new influx of business. All those new clients would need better servicing, they argued. I liked the idea, so we hired. Then we hired some more. Soon enough, we filled up almost every desk in our office.
Things went well – for a week or so. After that, our entire team was overcome with too much stress. Instead of performing their stated functions, new hires tried to involve themselves with radically different tasks and overly engage other team members. This was distracting for existing team members and caused us to veer from our original mission – providing really good marketing services. I was distracted from my task of growing the company. Though we strive for a team culture each day, there is a line that should not be crossed when delegating team member functions.
I wound up making a tough decision – to downsize the very team we had just expanded. I truly believed in our original team to deliver our mission in a timely and effective manner. And I believed that when pushed enough, compensated enough, and when under pressure, our team would deliver. They did. After downsizing our team, we expanded our output and wound up doing less with more.
The decision to downsize our team – and “trim” the excess staff from our agency was a tough one. I took a lot of criticism from within my own team. But in the end, we downsized for the long-term. We’d rather be a (very) sustainable agency that delivers great marketing services for years to come, rather than a bigger one that loses out on its main goal.
Sometimes, less really IS more. And sometimes, it makes all the difference.