What's a hire for?

We're drowning. I've heard that sentence in maybe forty first meetings, always offered as the reason for hiring, and it's always the answer to a question I didn't ask. I asked what the hire is for. Busy is a condition, not a role.

A hire made against busyness has a particular shape. They arrive, and work gets handed to them, and the work is whatever was overflowing that week. They confirm appointments. They chase the supplier. They fix the thing in the spreadsheet. They sit in on the call and take the notes. They handle the client who is annoyed about the invoice. All of it needed doing and all of it gets done, which is exactly why nobody notices the problem for about eight months.

The problem is that a role defined by overflow has no way to succeed. There's no number attached to it. There's nothing it owns that could be measurably better in ninety days. When it comes time to evaluate the person, the only available question is whether everyone still feels busy, and everyone always still feels busy.

So the hire can't fail visibly and can't succeed visibly. They just become part of the cost base.

The question I've come to prefer isn't what will this person do. It's what will this person be allowed to decide.

It's a harder question and owners hate it, because the honest answer is usually nothing. The person will schedule, prepare, chase, draft, and hand back. Every actual decision still routes through the owner, which means the owner has bought capacity and not relief, and capacity was never the thing that was scarce.

What was scarce was attention. The number of things one person can hold and care about at once, which is a fixed and fairly small number, and doesn't go up when you add staff who can't decide anything.

There's a decent argument against all of this and it's the one I've to take seriously in an economy where nobody is confident.

Sometimes you genuinely just need hands. A period of load that will pass. Somebody to hold the line for two quarters so the business doesn't break. That's real and it isn't a failure of thinking, and inventing a grand ownership charter for a temporary problem is its own kind of silliness.

The risk is that this reasoning can be used forever. Every hire is temporary until you've eleven of them and none of them can decide anything and the owner is more trapped than they were at four.

I don't have a clean rule. The rough one I use is to write the sentence before the job description. This person owns X, and in ninety days X will be measurably different, and I won't be involved in it.

If that sentence can't be written, the hire might still be correct. But it should be made knowingly, as a decision to buy time rather than to buy freedom, because those two purchases feel identical in the moment and turn out completely differently a year later.