Hardwired Humans. Andrew O'Keeffe
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to feel a sense of belonging. Typically, small teams suffer a sense of isolation. Small teams should be merged or at least connected at the next level so that individuals have a sense of belonging to a family-sized unit.
Teams can be too big. If a team is larger than nine people then the team is too large for people to have an intimate sense of connection and too large for the manager to lead.
In some organisations teams swell to 15, 20 or even 30 people. Be aware that such over-sized teams create a foundation of dysfunction. The leader is not able to spend the necessary time with each person. The team will struggle to deliver outputs. Team members become frustrated that the leader can’t respond to their requests fast enough. Factions or cliques will emerge in the team. This group is way beyond the size with which we bond intimately.
A group of middle managers of a manufacturing business shared with me their recent experience. They had teams of around 30 people reporting to their team leaders. The teams were structured around this size in order to save ‘unproductive headcount’ of managers. The assumption was that because the work of the 30 staff was routine production work, the structure could work. Frustrated with the low level of productivity in the group and after trying a range of possible solutions, the managers finally changed the structure and appointed team leaders to lead teams of around seven. Instantly the facility became more productive. Decision-making sped up, production obstacles were removed, groups were more efficiently in touch with each other and resources were more appropriately allocated.
The ideal is seven, plus or minus two, meaning between five and nine. This team size applies irrespective of the level of the organisation. A senior team of 14 will be too big for the executive members to gain a sense of intimate connection. Cliques will most likely form. A team this size will have duplicated functions and a width of coverage too broad for the head of the team to sufficiently cope. For senior executives a team size of five to nine is functional for another reason—such a team will naturally represent the range of functions that the CEO will need a line of sight to. These roles will represent the voices the CEO needs at the table for effective decision making. If the CEO has many more than nine voices, it can almost be guaranteed that voices will be duplicated and energies diluted. With such a large team the CEO will also be trying to skate across too many subjects and the operation will be hampered.
Flight Centre is a global organisation employing around 14,000 people in the travel industry. The company is regularly awarded Best Employer status in countries where it operates. One reason for its ongoing success is that it bases its organisational structure on human instinct principles which it calls ‘family, village and tribe’. In its retail travel stores, call centres and central functions, Flight Centre has teams of no more than seven staff. According to the Human Resources Director, Michael Murphy, ‘Any time we compromised the rule of seven and even had eight staff in a store, productivity dropped. From painful experience, we will not compromise team size, our family team, of seven in number. This family unit is a foundation of our business, both in terms of the connection of people and the accountability of managers.’
For Flight Centre, if a store is generating business that justifies more than seven people then the company opens another store in the same neighbourhood. The company will pay the extra infrastructure costs of a second store rather than suffer the predictable decline in productivity that accompanies a team larger than seven.
Flight Centre wisely knows that it’s impossible for staff to connect to a human group of 14,000. However, they also know that they can have a highly engaged group of staff if there is a strong sense of belonging. If staff members are highly connected at the local level within their team of seven and in their village of around 80 people then the company has a band of loyal, energetic people. The company has replicated this model around the world and attributes its growth, stability and sustainability to this principle.
Implication 2. Role of leader
The human instinct to connect with a small group of others gives clarity to the critical role of the team leader.
The natural condition for human family groups is to have a leader. This need for a leader of work teams applies irrespective of whether you manage a team of front-line sales staff, call centre operators or lead the top team. The team leader’s task is to be the effective leader of a family-sized group.
This role as the leader of a group of humans is both empowering and also carries with it obligations. It is indeed empowering for a leader to know that their people want someone in the leader role. Our natural model for our small group of intimates is to have a leader. The single leader model is still present in the natural family of mum and dad because both parents need to work as one and not allow mum to be played off against dad and vice versa—in functional families the two parents act ‘as if ‘ there was one leader/parent.
New managers are often uncertain of their role and power, so this insight should help them to have increased confidence in their leadership role. The team wants and needs them to be the leader. It also helps leaders promoted from within the team to make a quick transition from peer to leader. If the new manager continues to act as peer versus leader, they are leaving a leadership vacuum.
Yet there are also certain obligations that come with the team leader role. If the leader doesn’t fill those obligations then there can be only one result for human groups—without a leader the group will become dysfunctional. The same thing happens to chimpanzees in the absence of a single leader. Dr Goodall witnessed a two-year period amongst the Gombe chimps when there was no single leader of the community. There were two males competing for the top position, so during those two years the community was in chaos. One of the measures of dysfunction, she says, was that the other males used the opportunity to try to improve their social position and mating success. Only when one of the males achieved dominance did the community return to normal and harmony was restored.
So on the one hand people are fine about having a person fill the role of leader. But the leader also needs to sign up for the obligations that come with the leader role. The leader must:
set the vision and direction for the team so people have context for their role
connect the group to the rest of the organisation so they can see the value they provide
be an advocate for the team
provide appropriate resources so people can succeed
defend the team against unreasonable demands of others
set goals so people have clarity in their role
give feedback to help people learn and grow
value people’s contributions
provide an environment where people can progress to enhance their social standing
take care in bringing new members into the team
set the standards of behaviour and performance
hold to account those people who don’t work to those standards
minimise rivalries, address any conflict within the team and ensure harmony.
If the leader doesn’t deliver on these dimensions the group will be weakened, will be dysfunctional, performance will suffer, the leader will be considered inadequate and members of the team will want out to go join a functional team that acts as if it’s a family.
Implication 3. Gaining loyalty as though people elected the leader
Repeatedly, we are reminded of the impact managers have on staff engagement and retention. The Corporate Leadership Council conducted a study on the work attribute that most causes people to stay with their current organisation. The study explored 23 job attributes to find what people are least likely to trade off to leave one organisation to join another. It might surprise that the one attribute least likely to be traded wasn’t work challenge or location or company reputation or base salary. The attribute least likely to be traded off was manager quality. That is, if a person works for a good boss then they are not likely to change jobs, and as the study showed, if a person works for a good manager then any next employer