How many is too much?
DIVING INTO THE MATTER OF PERFECT TEAM SIZE
If you’ve grown up with the U.S. hip hop band Fugees like I have, you’ll remember the rap line …”too many MCs, not enough mics…” from the famous hit album “The score” (1996).
If not, then the proverb of having “too many cooks in the kitchen” might ring a bell. It goes back to the saying of “too many cooks spoil the broth” which alludes to the fact that if each of many cooks adds something to a soup, it will taste awful in the end (George Gascoigne, 1575).
Even though this proverbial saying has been around for literally centuries, we still seem to think it’s a viable and fantastic idea to make teams bigger. Adding more resources to a project or tasks will help productivity and ultimately the performance and desired outcome, seems to be the underlying assumption.
Believing and enabling self-organized teams to run projects or entire business bring back the fundamental question of “how many is too much” — how many team members are too much to boost engagement and quality of outcome.
Size matters
Imagine being back at summer camp (or whatever is the equal in your cultural realm) and being forced into an all-time favorite activity- “tug of war” or pulling the rope in two opposing teams. Two strong, teenage captains carefully chose their team members (based obviously on purely visual cues) and then face each other in a show-off of sheer muscle power. You would think, at least. However, the Ringelmann effect has proven a long time ago what all of us have felt — the more people you add the team, the more our individual productivity (here muscle power) diminishes. The simple rope-pulling exercise showed that adding more people to each team didn’t show the expected effect of a team’s pulling power equaling the sum of the individuals’ strengths, but rather a linear decrease with the addition of more team members (Ingham et al, 1974)
Back to our (hopefully self-organized) work teams: The reason for this drop in productivity is easily explained if you think about the sheer amount of links (or relationships) you have to manage. If n is the number of people in a team, the links grow almost exponentially (links = [n(n-1)]/2). Say you have a team of 4, then you have to manage a total of 6 links or relationships, if we take that up to 6 team members, you already have 15, and when we take it to 10 team members (not uncommon in project teams, start ups or other constellations), you are bound to manage 45 links.
That’s a lot of work that — you could argue- has little direct impact on the desired outcome. We fall in the trap of coordinating and communicating for the sake of it.
Cue the manager role who is only there to manage these links and numbers — would we really need them in smaller self-organized teams?
Team scaling fallacy
But the decrease in productivity and performance doesn’t just come from the mere fact that we need to manage a buck-load of relationships to keep everyone happy and engaged. The theory of relational loss also explains that with more people around, we actually feel less supported and engaged than if the team stays small. That type of relational loss, typically investigated in research on stress and coping mechanisms, has the implication that as team size increases, we perceive support to be less available, even if we are initially motivated (Mueller, 2012).
Unfortunately, organizations (read: we) are still prone to think that if a team needs to deliver on time or isn’t producing the right ideas or output, the magical solution is to add an expert or two to the mix. We however underestimate the project labor and overestimate gains rather than losses.
Heck, we even become overconfident as group size increases. Researchers Staats, Milkman and Fox found that we have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” They found that teams were almost twice as overoptimistic as team size doubled, while in reality taking 44% longer than the group half their size.
Jeff Bezoz clearly understood the dilemma, when he famously introduced the Two-Pizza Rule: teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed. In the early days of Amazon, he instituted the rule to keep project teams (and meetings) productive and nimble.
Questions to ask
This doesn’t mean that you have to turn into Jeff Bezos or your organization into Amazon. We should figure out our own ways to keep ourselves in check, knowing that we have a natural tendency to overestimate the effect of an additional team member. Here’s a few question to ask yourself and your team members:
- Which knowledge and perspective is absolutely necessary for team success?
Whether it’s the Bezos rule, the Navy Seals optimal combat team size (it’s 4, if you wonder), or Prof. Richard Hackman’s take (5–7, never more than 10) — never simply add people without checking whether they are truly necessary given all the losses that come with it. Is that person bringing something to the (virtual) table that you cannot cover in any other way?
In addition and relation to this above question, you also need to be careful in your consideration of how you can maximize diversity without adding more people. The benefits of diverse perspectives to solving complex problems, being more creative and innovative and minimizing blindspots are well-documented. But we cannot keep adding a token diversity spokesperson to the team. It’s a consideration that needs to be included upfront.
2. How do we keep engagement high in our team?
The phenomenon “relational loss” described above is based on subjective perception — we cannot rationalize away the perception of someone feeling less engaged and supported. Therefore it’s a must to keep a pulse on the team’s perception and and create a culture where “real conversations” can be held to address concerns, feelings and question motives and approaches.
Understanding the fundamentals of motivational drivers — what keeps us going, persisting and engaged — are a helpful starting point to know which levers to push and which barriers to remove.
3. How do we create transparency in this team?
Richard Hackman, psychology professor at Harvard University, spent a life-time investigating what makes teams so unproductive. Lacking transparency, and lacking clarity of boundaries are two of the clear indicators he collected over the course of several decades. One crucial support system he noticed is “an information system that provides teams the data and forecasts members’ needs to proactively manage their work”.
What platforms, systems and tools can we use to provide self-service transparency that will help in distributing information and power to move us forward as a (self-organized) team together?
Team size matters. It matters a whole lot as we just saw. But it doesn’t end there.
Which brings me back to 1996 and the Fugees who sang:
“ M) to the (A) to the (S) to the (K),
put the mask up on the face just to make the next day …
My posse Uptown wear the mask.
My crew in the Queens wear the mask.
Stick up kids with the Tommy Hil wear the mask.
Yeah everbody wear the mask but how long will it last.”
But more on that another time…
