Small Well-Focussed Teams

Jeffrey Philips over at Thinking Faster exposes a philosophy that I have exposed myself for a long time:

Note though, that I am advocating making your team, your hierarchy, your organization as small as possible.  That’s counter-intuitive in a time when we are evaluated on how large a team we manage.  Frankly, I’d rather manage a smaller team that has greater focus and higher commitment.  I guess it’s a question of guerilla tactics versus the armed frontal assault.

Put me into a small team focussed on a task and we will together each miraculous things, put anyone (including me) into a large, diverse, physically separated team and the level of productivity will diminish into nothingness.

This morning I have attended a conference call with a cast of thousands on it (well not really but I think you get the viewpoint) and the call followed the age old rule on productivity – a meeting will only move at the pace of the slowest person. Small well-focussed teams don’t work like that, everyone knows where they are going and agree how to get there. What’s more small well-focussed teams allow for a much better division of responsibilities. In large teams you quite quickly get to the point where you rely on individuals to answer questions because the team isn’t of one mind. This is counter-intuitive, but having been the individual that others rely upon on more than one occasion I can tell you that it’s true. Questions don’t get answered in a timely manner in this model. What’s more questions are normally asked more than once. This happens because the trusted individual isn’t always available, so a semi-trusted individual is asked who may or may not answer the question correctly. It doesn’t actually matter whether they answer correctly or not, because they are semi-trusted the question will get asked again of the trusted individual. This wastes everyones time.

Small teams behave like a pack of dogs – large teams behave like a pack of sheep.