Scaling a Lean Team: How One Government Division Improved Performance Without Adding Staff

The public sector constraint: you often can’t hire

Government managers don’t usually get to say “we need more people for that.” Hiring freezes, classification systems, budget appropriations, and legislative mandates create structural and political constraints that leaders have to work around.

I worked with a vice president whose small, innovative division inside a large organization faced that situation. He had to meet significant growth targets with no new headcount and a team that was already stretched thin. He needed more from people who were already giving everything they had.

I began with an assessment of the team, speaking to key stakeholders to understand their experiences, strengths, and pain points. Team members were keenly aware of the inefficient processes they had to navigate, the lack of sufficient headcount, and the number of high touch customers and corresponding escalations. However, these pain points were largely outside their control.

What was really holding performance back (and what wasn’t)

Several leaders on this team were so focused on managing up and out that they weren’t investing in the people directly below them. I learned they weren’t empowering direct reports to make decisions, recognizing people’s contributions, or modeling the kind of leadership they said they wanted to see from others.

I used the Hogan Personality Assessment with the leadership team. Hogan is a validated assessment that surfaces people’s strengths, how they operate under pressure, what they value, and where they’re likely to derail. It gives you data where you used to have guesses, and it’s particularly useful when you’re trying to figure out how to actually put a team together rather than assume that job descriptions map cleanly onto people.

The VP shared his own results with the team, openly, including the parts he was still working on. When the person with the most positional power leads with that kind of honesty, it creates permission for everyone else. Although I always negotiate confidentiality, every single person on his team chose to share their Hogan data with him. That doesn’t happen without real trust.

The turning point: validated assessments changed the conversation

This level of transparency afforded clear insight into restructuring the group so that each person could play to their strengths, and it gave the VP insight on how to mentor each person on an ongoing basis. To support the VP, I provided group coaching to build key leadership skills and ongoing coaching to individuals who were stepping into new levels of responsibility.

The most striking shift involved two leaders who had been in low-grade conflict for over a decade. Once they could see their own profiles side by side, something clicked. They had nearly opposite cognitive styles and almost perfectly complementary strengths and had been competing where they should have been collaborating. When they could finally see that, the conflict dissolved. Their path out of conflict and into collaboration unlocked even greater performance than before.

The team made other changes too: genuinely empowering direct reports to make decisions, protecting personal time, streamlining meetings that had become performative rather than useful, and investing in real team connection.

The division hit its targets.

Takeaways for HR and public sector leaders

Here’s what I want HR professionals and public sector leaders to take from this. When a team is underperforming, the instinct is to push harder, tighten oversight, or wait for a new hire that may never be approved. But sometimes the most powerful move is helping leaders understand themselves well enough to lead differently. Validated assessments give you data where you had guesses. Transparency builds the trust that makes change move fast. And restructuring around actual human strengths, rather than org chart assumptions, creates the conditions for people to do their best work.

That’s true in the private sector. It’s just as true in government, where you often can’t buy your way out of a capacity problem and culture is one of the few levers you actually control.