Staffing, Outsourcing, and the Space in Between 

In much of the work I do with leaders, I see the same patterns in how organizations are building and managing teams. It’s harder than expected to get people productive, capacity starts to feel tight as volume increases, and there isn’t a clear way to see how individuals are actually performing. At the same time, a lot of time gets pulled into managing the day‑to‑day—tracking work, handling coordination, and dealing with the things around the work that no one explicitly owns. Leaders find themselves more involved than they planned to be—tracking down laptops, access, or basic setup issues just to keep work moving—and still making calls they assumed would be owned somewhere else. 

When that happens, it’s often a signal that it may be time to consider a different operating approach—one better suited to the scale, complexity, and demands of the work. 

When the work outgrows the model 

Once the work gains momentum, the same patterns tend to show up time and time again. Leaders have a hard time seeing how work is progressing beyond a general sense of whether things feel on track.  

Effort is evident, but clarity on who is driving outcomes—and where execution is stalling—remains limited. And the biggest pain point I hear from customers is that a lot of time gets spent on coordination: tracking work, answering questions, filling gaps, and keeping things moving without anyone being clearly responsible for the whole. 

While teams are more than capable, the work can begin to demand more day-to-day attention than leaders should need to give it. As scope or volume increases, keeping everything aligned starts pulling them deeper into the details—time that could be better spent on strategic decisions, shaping direction, and focusing on the areas where they add the most value. 

---

READ NEXT: Staffing or Managed Teams: Choosing When Everything is Changing

---

Looking beyond staffing 

The usual response is to turn the conversation to staffing, reevaluating roles and seniority, and considering if more people are needed. While that may be the answer for some, it could also be a reaction to execution pressure rather than the source of it. 

What’s really happening is that the work now needs more structure than it did before. Decisions that used to be informal need clearer ownership, and coordination that happened naturally now takes effort. Accountability that was assumed needs to be defined. When those things don’t keep pace with scale, leaders end up stepping in to fill the gaps themselves. 

The tricky part is that nothing is obviously broken. The team is capable. The work is getting done. Results may still be coming in. But it takes more time, more attention, and more intervention from leadership than it should. That’s the signal worth paying attention to—that staffing once worked fine, but now it needs to evolve. 

Why outsourcing may not solve this either 

When staffing starts to feel heavy, some leaders swing the other direction and look at outsourcing the work entirely. On paper, that can sound appealing—fewer decisions to make, less day‑to‑day involvement, someone else owning delivery. 

However, that can often create a different kind of friction. Leaders lose visibility into how work is progressing. Feedback slow down. Course corrections get harder. For work that’s still evolving—or closely tied to the business—being fully removed from execution can introduce more risk than it removes. 

Outsourcing has its place, and it works in the right context. But the issue is assuming that handing work off automatically resolves the ownership and coordination challenges that show up at scale. In many cases, it just shifts where those challenges surface. 

Somewhere in the middle 

What this leaves many leaders with is a sense that neither option quite fits. They don’t want to manage every detail, but they also don’t want to be completely cut out of the work. They want clearer ownership, better visibility, and fewer day‑to‑day escalations—without losing the ability to stay close to decisions that matter. 

This is where many organizations start experimenting. They look for ways to introduce more structure around the work itself: clearer accountability, defined ownership, and shared responsibility for outcomes. While it’s referred to by many names—custom or blended teams, managed services, pods—the goal is the same.  

This middle space is less of a new model, and more of finding a unique solution to achieve your organization’s unique goals and outcomes. It’s another option, an adjustment to how teams are set up and run when the work reaches a certain level of scale or complexity. 

Through my work at Insight Global, I’ve seen creating built-for-purpose teams used as a way to introduce clearer ownership around the work itself. In the right situations, that added structure can reduce execution drag without pushing leaders too far from the decisions they still need to own.  

If you’re seeing some of this in your own organization and want to talk it through, I’m happy to connect. 

---

Scott Cornick is a Managing Director of Talent Services Solutions at Insight Global Consulting, where he leads a team of solutions professionals focused on helping organizations design and execute scalable, outcome-driven strategies. In this role, he is responsible for advancing the firm’s Talent Services portfolio, driving service maturation, and delivering innovative workforce and business process solutions that align directly to business outcomes.