The Hidden Cost of Overloading Your Talent in GovCon
Today on LinkedIn, we shared a quote from legendary value investor Peter Cundill: “You can teach a donkey to climb a tree, but it’s easier to hire a squirrel.” It struck a chord in me because it captures a truth many of us wrestle with daily, especially in government contracting: We often ask more of the people around us than they signed up for.
Sometimes, this stretching is healthy—a real personal growth opportunity. But more often, especially when budgets are tight and headcounts are limited, we end up stacking “extra duties” onto our best people. We ask them to juggle work that’s wildly outside their scope. We rationalize it as agility or “wearing many hats,” but rarely do we pause and ask:
Is it good for them, or just good for me?
The Quiet Overload in GovCon
In the GovCon world, this dynamic is especially visible. Consider the Program Manager who is not only leading contract execution but is also tapped for business development, recruiting, proposal writing, and solutioning on the side. Maybe they do it because they want to help. Maybe they do it because they know if they don’t, no one will.
But over time, this load erodes performance.
Instead of mastering the mission and growing the contract, the PM is pulled in so many directions that:
Contract execution falters.
Growth opportunities are missed.
Proposal quality declines.
Morale plummets.
Ironically, the very people who are overloaded in the name of “growth” end up burned out and disconnected — creating retention problems and missed revenue targets.
You can’t make a donkey climb a tree. And you can’t expect your best performers to carry an endless stack of “other duties as assigned” without breaking something important: their trust, their engagement, or their health.
It's a Business Problem, Not a Personnel Problem
When we overload staff, we’re not just risking burnout—we’re creating structural inefficiencies in our business. Every extra duty pulled away from a person’s core strength diminishes the value they deliver.
In GovCon, where execution, compliance, and growth are equally critical, this can mean the difference between:
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Winning and losing recompetes.
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Scaling or stagnating.
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Keeping a high-functioning team or cycling through constant backfills.
If your Program Manager or operations staff was hired to execute business operations, don’t weigh them down with tasks meant for an entire ecosystem of specialists. It doesn’t serve them, and in the long run, it doesn’t serve you.
Solving the Problem: Intentionally
Recognizing this challenge is the first step. Solving it requires intention.
Whether you bring in an outside partner like Kinetic to take the strain off your operations team, or you invest in hiring dedicated growth-focused resources internally, it is imperative that you choose a path that preserves your team’s focus and well-being. Expecting your execution staff to “do it all” is a recipe for slow (hopefully just slow) decline.
At Kinetic, we designed B&PaaS™ — Bid and Proposal as a Service™ — to solve precisely this issue. We saw great operational teams being asked to shoulder growth activities simply because there was no one else to do it.
B&PaaS lets companies decouple their growth operations from the execution layer. Instead of asking your best operators to moonlight as growth engines, we embed expert support to:
Guide Strategy,
Drive pipeline development,
Execute Capture Activities,
Manage proposal production,
Support recruiting for key roles,
And allow your mission-focused staff to stay mission-focused.
B&PaaS exists to protect your team from being set up to fail.
The right people, doing the right jobs, for the right outcomes.
If you’re interested in learning how B&PaaS can free up your team to do what they do best, let’s talk.
Chuck H. – CEO, Kinetic Wins
