Empire building is one of the most well-known political moves in the company politics playbook. The difference between healthy team growth and politically-motivated empire building always feels obvious in retrospect, but it's much harder to identify as it's unfolding within your own company.

It's easy to blame middle managers for playing politics when they focus on empire building above all else, but usually they're just responding to what upper management rewards.

At one of my first Big Company management jobs, I naively thought I would focus on building a small, nimble team of top-10% engineers. We would work cohesively in small but highly efficient teams to deliver results. And it worked! We delivered great things to high praise from our customers faster than expected. Sales were up, customer feedback was up, but politically, we were suffering within the company. A few reasons:

- HR and upper management didn't like engineers being paid significantly above average. Hiring 2-4 top-10% engineers and paying them accordingly attracted a lot scrutiny and criticism from management. Teams who hired 10+ average engineers at average compensation didn't have any problems. Politically, the best move was to ignore the best candidates and focus on hiring as many average candidates as possible.

- Upper management used headcount as a proxy for estimating each team's contributions to a project. If I had 2 principle-level software engineers leading an initiative but my peer allocated 5 junior engineers to his portion of the project, he might collect more credit when those personnel reports go out. Politically, you wanted more names to put in slide decks and more lines on the personnel report spreadsheets wherever management wasn't paying attention to the details.

- The empire builders always had idle hands among their growing headcount, so they were always available to "save the day" by allocating some spare engineers to other department's problems. Ironically, this made it more difficult for other departments to hire more people because management remembered the "save the day" move more than the core work delivered. Politically, if putting out fires is rewarded above all else, you want as many idle hands as possible to assign at a moment's notice.

- Empire builders always had poor performers available to take blame and get fired. Small teams of high performers couldn't spare anyone. When we had budget cuts and headcount reductions, the empire builders always had a few people they could fire with zero consequence to the team. The smaller teams suffered when they lost one of their key performers. Likewise, when empire builders had a project fall behind or fail, they always had an underperforming employee around who could take the blame and get fired, and they also had someone else who could step up and take credit for rescuing the project.

Through all of this, management had no idea they were encouraging empire-building over productivity and cooperation. They were just rewarding what they saw through their slide decks, spreadsheets, and other narrow snapshots of the company that didn't really reflect who was delivering the most value.

Fixing these problems always starts with management. Be very careful about what you reward. And be very careful about how you measure success, because your employees will notice. Any incentive system, explicit or otherwise, will be gamed.