Small teams are better.
Most of my work with teams is with small business; therefore, the size of the team is small. The nice thing about small teams is that they are flexible and nimble. Change can be communicated quickly, resulting in a quicker buy-in from employees.
In his Forbes article Five Ways to Make Your Teams More Engaged and Productive, Jacob Morgan, has some great recommendations for engagement with small teams. Most importantly he says that autonomy is crucial, “Autonomy is a crucial factor for productivity and engagement. Nobody wants or likes to be micro-management. Instead of tracking hours organizations should focus on outcomes and outputs. As many organizations have told me, the role of managers is simply to help employees understand where the company needs to go, but how the company gets there is up to the employees.”
He also states that small teams can be measured by two pizzas. “If your team can’t be fed by two pizzas then it might be time to rethink the current structure or perhaps split them up into smaller teams.” In order to keep group-think and bureaucracy to a minimum, keep your teams small. For small businesses, this is a given, but if your business is larger than 20, I recommend, creating smaller teams for projects.
Finally, Morgan suggests that regularly challenging outdated management practices will keep your employees engaged. I agree with this because our employees are becoming more sophisticated and more diverse. Dated ways of managing, such as annual performance reviews, top-down decision making, can squeeze the life from an exuberant team, and otherwise engaged employees.
Here’s Jacob’s article again. Have a read and tell me what you think.