Managers outwardly grow by acquiring prestige/reports/products. There are many counterproductive methods of gaming this success criteria via empire building, irrational promotion of internal managers, and over-hiring.

Growing startups either need to hire skilled management from successful firms by offering an outwardly visible step up - or promote internally. Either way your odds of hiring a manager gaming the metrics to one extent or another are pretty high.

A good alternative is to aim for less management overall and explicitly avoid using metrics like hiring etc in your evaluation of managers. Almost every large and successful firm I’ve known has gone through a “less management” phase prior to reverting to the mean.