The power of small

Conventional wisdom says that bigger is better. Bigger challenges require more people. High-growth companies need to focus on scale. Bigger departments have the capacity to solve bigger problems.

But bigger also typically means slower. And speed is the factor everyone should be trying to optimize for.

Bigger also typically means a looser concentration to the core purpose of the work that is being done. And purpose has a direct correlation to motivation.

The math here is simple. If you want motivated employees creating impact fast, don’t build big teams.

This isn’t necessarily an entirely novel concept, but it’s application is more important than ever. Here is a quick round up of some interesting industry perspectives on this issue:

• Jeff Bezos has his famed “two-pizza rule,” that if a team can’t be fed with two pizzas, it’s too big.
• University of San Diego psychology professor Jennifer Mueller has a theory called relational loss that looks at how an individual can perceive that their level of support in a team actually decreases as the team gets larger.
• The late Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman talks about big teams and the “coordination cost.” He says, “A colleague and I once did some research showing that as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble.”
• General Stanley McChrystal even touted the power of small teams in his fight against Al Qaeda, shaping the US military to act more nimbly across its units in a “team of teams” fashion.
• Google studied hundreds of their teams to try and find the secret sauce that creates the perfect team. Ultimately, “psychological safety”— the “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking” — turned out to the key difference, something which is far easier to maintain among a small group.

And, finally, while social scientist Daniel Pink (of TED Talk fame), doesn’t explicitly talk about small teams in his talk about “the puzzle of motivation,” his 3 pillars of motivation that drive people — autonomy, mastery and purpose — are paramount to designing teams. Small teams that can move quickly and allow people to feel empowered to make decisions and have autonomy. By working in a small team you are also inherently more responsible for your domain, thus building mastery. And, at the heart of small teams, is each team member’s proximity to the core reason-for-being that the team has — nurturing each individual’s sense of purpose.

The perfect size of a team? There is no such thing, but most people will say to be wary of double digits. 4–8 seems to be the sweet spot. But, using Jeff Bezos’ methodology, perhaps the real question to answer is how hungry your team is.