Everywhere you turn, businesses are being asked to do more with less. The team is lean. Budgets are tight.
Expectations? Sky-high.
And yet, the pressure to deliver, to show visible results, real productivity, and stronger managerial performance hasn’t eased one bit. If anything, it’s gotten louder. More targets. More meetings. More dashboards. More KPIs.
Naturally, most leaders’ first instinct is to hire. More hands-on deck must mean more output, right?
But what if more people aren’t the answer? What if the real performance unlock has nothing to do with headcount, and everything to do with fixing broken systems, aligning teams, and building workflows that actually work?
This was the core of a recent high-level webinar conversation hosted by NotchHR, where experts Dr. Toyin Sam-Emehelu and Felix Bissong (popularly known as GenZHR) shared bold truths that most companies are still too afraid to admit:
“You can’t outperform a misaligned life or a confused system.”
In this post, we’ll unpack the managerial performance myths, the mindset shifts, and the practical fixes that can help any organization, whether a startup or legacy, increase performance without hiring more people.
Let’s get into it.
The Dangerous Myth: More People Equal More Performance
One of the most pervasive illusions in modern organizational culture is the assumption that managerial performance issues can be solved by simply expanding the team. It’s a default response when things aren’t moving as fast as expected, or when goals aren’t being met, many leaders immediately reach for the headcount lever. The logic seems straightforward: more people should mean more results.
But in reality, this approach often leads to diminishing returns, bloated payrolls, and fragmented workflows.
As Felix Bissong, a senior HR consultant and talent strategist, put it during the NotchHR webinar:
“You cannot outperform a misaligned system.”
It’s a powerful truth, and one that cuts through the noise.
When your managerial performance stalls, it’s rarely because the team is too small. According to McKinsey, “Companies that focus on their people’s performance are 4.2 × more likely to outperform peers, realizing ~30 % higher revenue growth and 5 pts lower attrition.” This underscores how strategic managerial performance systems—not headcount—influence outcomes. More often, it’s because the existing team lacks clarity, structure, or the right tools to work efficiently. Without proper managerial performance systems in place, systems that define success, track progress, and support autonomy, adding more people only amplifies the confusion.
Imagine a startup hiring 20 people in a rush to scale, only to discover that half of them are doing overlapping work, chasing vague deliverables, and relying on manual processes that drain time and morale. We can’t call this growth; it is 100% chaos disguised as progress.
Keeping a well-balanced managerial performance is about direction, not numbers. A lean, focused team operating within a well-designed system will always outperform a larger team trapped in disorder.
And yet, the myth persists. Why?
Because it’s easier to hire than to audit, it’s easier to assign blame to “insufficient capacity” than to confront the uncomfortable truth that internal systems may be broken. It feels more proactive to expand than to pause, evaluate, and rebuild.
But the companies that are truly thriving today, especially under economic pressure, are not those hiring aggressively. They’re the ones asking better questions:
- Where is work being duplicated?
- Which tasks can be automated?
- Are our KPIs clear, relevant, and realistically achievable?
- Are we managing for output, or just managing for motion?
Until those questions are answered, more people won’t solve anything. They’ll only magnify what is already not working.
The bottom line? If your system is broken, throwing more people at it will only break it faster.
The Root Problem: Systemic Misalignment
When teams struggle to perform, the problem is rarely about intelligence or capacity; it’s about alignment.
Systemic misalignment is one of the most silent yet lethal killers of productivity in modern organizations. It hides in the culture, seeps into workflows, and corrodes trust quietly until results begin to drop, tensions rise, and everyone starts looking outward instead of inward.
But what exactly does “misalignment” look like in real terms?
It looks like job descriptions that are vague or outdated. It looks like new hires are being handed laptops without structured onboarding. It looks like managers are expecting initiative from team members who were never given clarity on what success looks like. It looks like employees are showing up every day, doing “their best,” but having no idea if their best aligns with the company’s goals.
Dr. Toyin captured it succinctly in the webinar:
“Real performance is not about being busy. It’s about clarity, energy, and alignment.”
Without clarity, people fill in the blanks based on assumptions. Without energy, which stems from feeling seen, equipped, and supported, even the most talented professionals burn out or disengage. And without alignment, teams move in parallel instead of in unison, which means goals are missed not because people are slacking, but because they’re running in different directions.
Even worse, many businesses have unknowingly designed performance-killing systems. Consider this:
- KPIs are unclear or inconsistently applied.
- There is no structured performance feedback loop.
- Onboarding is rushed or nonexistent.
- Titles are inflated to impress, not to reflect actual roles.
- There’s no shared understanding of “what success looks like.”
In these conditions, hiring more people only multiplies the misalignment. More hands won’t help if the work isn’t clearly defined or prioritized. In fact, it usually leads to more internal confusion, higher costs, and employee frustration.
To move beyond this chaos, companies must stop viewing their managerial performance as a headcount problem and start addressing it as a systems problem. This means pausing to examine workflows, communication norms, performance management structures, and feedback mechanisms. It means building environments where expectations are documented, tracked, and understood.
And perhaps most importantly, it means realizing that alignment is a continuous, intentional process, not a one-off activity that must be embedded into the organization’s rhythm.
Until that happens, “more people” will always feel like the answer — but it will never be the solution.
Strategic Shift #1: Build Smarter Systems, Not Bigger Teams
If there’s one principle high-performing organizations understand instinctively, it’s this: scale doesn’t begin with size — it begins with structure.
Before any company considers increasing its headcount, it must first ask: Do our current systems support the kind of performance we expect?
Too often, businesses assume the problem is people-related when, in fact, the bottleneck is structural. Teams are not underperforming because they lack competence; they are underperforming because the systems supporting their work are fragmented, outdated, or altogether absent.
Felix shared a case that’s all too familiar: a startup founder who, after securing funding, immediately hired 20 people. Within months, the budget collapsed, outcomes stalled, and the team was quietly downsized to seven, not because those seven were superhuman, but because once the business adopted proper systems and automated repetitive tasks, the team finally had space to focus and deliver.
What is the lesson here? People are not your leverage until your systems are clean.
Smarter systems are about focus, consistency, and accountability. Organizations embracing regular feedback systems demonstrate 39 % higher talent attraction and 44 % better retention rates.”
When performance expectations are built into workflows, when responsibilities are clearly mapped, and when progress is tracked without micromanagement, people become free to execute at their best.
This is where performance management platforms like NotchHR play a transformational role. They eliminate the invisible work, the back-and-forths, the guesswork, the manual tracking that often consumes hours and erodes morale. They make it easy to define KPIs, assign goals, monitor progress, and provide real-time feedback. More importantly, they help leadership spot where the leaks are, not from intuition, but from actual data.
You cannot lead a performance-driven team on vibes and memory. You need rhythm. You need automation. You need a single source of truth that shows what’s working, who’s thriving, and where the friction lives.
This is what modern systems deliver: not more noise, but more clarity.
Until that clarity is in place, hiring more people becomes a very expensive distraction. But with the right systems? A lean team can deliver enterprise-level outcomes and do it with confidence.
Strategic Shift #3: Fix the First Leak — Onboarding
If performance is the outcome, then onboarding is the foundation, and unfortunately, it’s one that many companies still treat as an afterthought.
Too often, new hires walk into organizations full of potential but are immediately set up to underperform. Why? Because no one has taken the time to guide them through the systems, expectations, or culture they’re stepping into. They receive an email, a laptop, perhaps a handbook, and then they’re left to figure it out.
We can’t call this onboarding. That’s orientation dressed in urgency.
The cost of this oversight is massive. Poor onboarding is one of the most common and preventable performance leaks in early-stage and scaling companies. When a new employee is unsure of who they report to, unclear about what success looks like, or unaware of how their role fits into the larger system, their energy is wasted on guesswork. They begin their journey on unstable footing, and many never fully recover from that initial uncertainty.
As Felix shared during the session:
“If your onboarding is terrible, everything else will be terrible. It’s where performance starts or collapses.”
The absence of structure during onboarding leads to:
- Misalignment between goals and actions
- Delayed time-to-value for the employee and the team
- Unnecessary dependency on other team members
- Early burnout from a lack of support or clarity
High-performing teams are engineered from day one. That means creating a thoughtful, multi-layered onboarding experience that covers much more than “how we do things here.” It must answer the deeper questions every new team member brings with them:
- What is expected of me, and by when?
- Who will I be collaborating with and how?
- What does excellence look like in this role?
- How does my work contribute to something bigger?
The best onboarding systems are immersive experiences, not rigid manuals. They involve early check-ins, cross-functional introductions, visibility into the company’s mission, values, and strategic roadmap. They assign a guide or “buddy” who helps navigate the cultural terrain. They include structured feedback loops, so the organization learns just as much from the newcomer as the newcomer learns from the company.
And here’s where HR technology proves indispensable.
An HRMS like NotchHR creates consistency, tracks progress, and embeds clarity into every step. From automated task lists to performance goal setting, it ensures that no employee enters the organization with guesswork as their default mode. The system becomes a mentor, a manager, and a map, all in one place.
The truth is, you cannot build a high-performing team on a poorly constructed welcome. If onboarding is broken, performance will always leak, and no amount of motivation or micro-management will patch it.
Fix the first leak, and you fix the flow.
Strategic Shift #4: From Titles to True Capacity
One of the costliest mistakes early-stage companies make, particularly in fast-moving industries, is confusing job titles with capability. It’s a subtle misstep, often made with good intentions, but it almost always leads to long-term dysfunction.
To attract talent or signal maturity, founders frequently assign inflated titles. A junior marketer becomes “Head of Growth.” A newly hired finance assistant is suddenly a “CFO.” The logic is usually emotional or reactive, meant to boost morale, secure loyalty, or give the illusion of scale. But the consequences, though slow to surface, are serious.
As Felix put it during the conversation:
“You can’t throw a fancy title on someone and expect strategic outcomes. Titles don’t deliver — competencies do.”
Here’s the hard truth: when the role outpaces the person, the team suffers. The strategy slows down. Accountability becomes blurry. Decision-making gets bottlenecked because the person wearing the title isn’t equipped to carry the weight of the role.
What makes this even more dangerous is that it often goes unnoticed until the organization starts to scale, and suddenly, the gap between what the title suggests and what the individual can deliver becomes glaring. New hires report to managers who aren’t truly managers. Decisions fall through the cracks. Culture erodes under the weight of ambiguity.
And let’s not forget the ripple effect: inflated titles distort compensation expectations across the market. They create unrealistic benchmarks, mislead recruiters, and frustrate other companies trying to hire transparently. They also make it incredibly difficult for those same individuals to transition into new roles, because their titles no longer match their experience.
So, what is the alternative?
Capacity-first hiring.
Rather than defining people by titles, define roles by outcomes. Assess whether the individual has the skills, discipline, and emotional intelligence to lead, manage, or execute at the required level. Ask deeper questions:
- Does this person have the operational maturity this role demands?
- Can they manage complexity, ambiguity, and scale?
- Do they understand how to make decisions, resolve conflict, and build systems?
- Have they demonstrated pattern recognition, not just activity?
Assigning roles based on competence, not cosmetics, allows the business to grow from a place of truth. It sets clear expectations, supports healthy accountability, and avoids the awkward performance issues that come when someone is managing a title they were never trained to wear.
And once again, this is where HR systems can play a defining role.
With tools like NotchHR, leaders can assess actual contributions through data, not gut feeling. They can track OKRs, review outputs over time, and adjust roles based on real performance. This enables the organization to promote based on evidence, not ego, and to grow teams that are grounded in ability, not assumptions.
Because at the end of the day, titles may attract attention, but only true capacity sustains momentum.
Strategic Shift #5: Nurture Core Skills — Not Just Job Descriptions
Most job descriptions are written for roles. Very few are written for reality.
They focus on tasks, not on traits. They list responsibilities, not the internal capacities required to execute them in fast-changing, high-stakes environments. And in doing so, they often overlook the very thing that separates average teams from high-performing ones: core skills.
Dr. Toyin raised a powerful point during the session, one that deserves every leader’s attention:
“We often reward compliance over curiosity. But the future belongs to thinkers, not just doers.”
In other words, companies spend too much time looking for people who can follow instructions and not enough time building people who can ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and solve problems no one has named yet.
The most underrated skill in this 21st century? Critical thinking.
Research from Gallup found that employees who receive weekly, meaningful feedback are four times more likely to be engaged. That’s the kind of thinking and initiative no title can replace. And that’s not an exaggeration. While technical know-how and role-specific competencies are important, they are useless in environments where no one knows how to think through complexity, challenge flawed processes, or adapt strategy when the ground shifts, which, in today’s business climate, happens often.
Here’s what critical thinking unlocks inside an organization:
- Team members stop waiting for direction and start anticipating problems
- Meetings become spaces for progress, not passive agreement
- Time and money are saved because people make better, faster, and more informed decisions
- Internal feedback becomes constructive, not combative
Companies that fail to prioritize this kind of thinking often find themselves micromanaging by default, not because they want to, but because no one is stepping forward with thoughtful initiative.
Worse, when curiosity and problem-solving are undervalued, people learn to hide behind their job descriptions. They become risk-averse. They perform the letter of the role but never step into the spirit of the mission. And slowly, culture calcifies into something that looks busy but is deeply brittle.
So, what can leaders do?
Start by making core skills development a visible priority. Move beyond checkbox training. Encourage team members to challenge workflows, raise better questions, and take ownership of their decisions. Normalize feedback. Reward good judgment. Make curiosity a KPI.
And most importantly, don’t leave this to chance or charisma.
Tools like NotchHR allow organizations to bake core skills into performance tracking. By integrating qualitative feedback, structured evaluations, and continuous learning milestones, companies can finally stop managing for compliance and start managing for capability.
Because in the end, managerial performance isn’t just about doing the job. It’s about growing the capacity to do the right job, better, under pressure — and with vision.
The Role of HR Tech in Sustaining High Performance
High performance is the outcome of intelligent design, disciplined execution, and systems that remove friction from the work that matters most.
And yet, many organizations are still relying on spreadsheets, memory, and fragmented tools to manage something as critical as performance.
The truth is, you cannot sustain high performance without system-level support.
That’s where HR tech, specifically HRMS platforms like NotchHR, becomes essential. Not optional. Not “nice to have.” Essential.
Because at a certain point, no matter how talented your people are, no matter how noble your culture is, friction will win if the system is broken.
What does HR tech solve? Let’s break it down:
- Clarity of expectations: Instead of vague job descriptions, employees see their KPIs, OKRs, and role expectations clearly laid out and updated in real time.
- Continuous feedback loops: Instead of annual reviews that feel performative and backward-looking, feedback is baked into the workflow, frequent, contextual, and actionable.
- Onboarding that actually onboards: From first login to full integration, HR tech ensures new hires are never left to guess their way into performance.
- Data-driven decisions: Leaders no longer rely on perception or popularity when making people decisions. They see patterns in real time — who’s growing, who’s struggling; what needs attention.
- Time reclaimed: HR professionals stop being firefighters and start becoming architects. When automation handles the repetitive, HR can focus on strategy, coaching, and culture.
Felix put it plainly:
“You can’t keep hiring people when your performance system is broken. At some point, you have to fix the foundation.”
That foundation is data, structure, rhythm, and all of that is enabled by technology that isn’t clunky, intimidating, or rigid, but intuitive, human-centered, and designed to scale with the organization.
Think of it this way: HR tech is about enhancing it with visibility, structure, and speed, not about replacing human judgment.
It doesn’t reduce the need for leadership — it frees leaders actually to lead.
And when implemented well, it becomes the silent co-pilot behind every high-performing team. Quietly syncing goals. Tracking effort. Elevating conversations. And ensuring no one is guessing about what matters.
In a world where performance is currency, the organizations that win will not be those who work the hardest, but those who work the smartest, with systems that are designed to scale, not strain.
Conclusion: Scaling Isn’t About Size — It’s About Smarts
In the race to grow, it’s easy to believe that progress requires more — more people, more activity, more movement. But the organizations that are quietly outperforming their peers aren’t the ones growing in headcount. They’re the ones growing in clarity, systems, and structural intelligence.
- They understand that performance isn’t a function of pressure. It’s the result of intentional design.
- They know that titles without capacity collapse under scale.
- Hiring without onboarding is organizational negligence.
- That activity without alignment is just an expensive noise.
- And that, without clear systems, even your most brilliant people will underdeliver.
Performance doesn’t live in the number of people you hire; it lives in the systems you build, the culture you model, and the clarity you enforce.
If your current team feels stuck, exhausted, or underwhelmed in their delivery, it may not be because they’re the wrong people. It may be because your managerial performance systems are asking them to run marathons barefoot.
The smarter path — the sustainable path — is to fix what’s leaking before pouring in more.
- Audit your workflows.
- Revisit your onboarding experience.
- Stop assigning titles based on optics.
- Start defining performance based on outcomes, not effort.
- And use technology, not as a crutch, but as a catalyst.
At NotchHR, that’s exactly what we help forward-thinking companies do: design systems that unlock your managerial performance, without bloating payroll, burning out people, or getting lost in tactical fog.
