From the course: Teamwork Foundations

What is the best size of a team?

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

What is the best size of a team?

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- Have you noticed how if you have dinner with more than about five people, the conversation tends to fragment into smaller subgroups of a more optimum size, maybe two or three? It's the same with teams at work. With large teams, it gets really difficult for everyone to listen to everyone else. And almost impossible for decisions to be agreed. The more people you have, the more scope there is for misunderstandings, disagreements, and gaps and overlaps in who's doing what. This was demonstrated by Max Ringelmann a hundred years ago when he tested people pulling on a rope in a tug-of-war. He found that if you have a team of people, they all pull with less effort than you get from one person pulling on their own. It's known as the Ringelmann Effect, and it says that individual productivity tends to decrease as group size increases. This is partly due to communication and coordination problems leading to less efficient work. And partly due to what he called social loafing. The fact that people can increasingly rely on everyone else doing the work and nobody will know. In a team of 10, you can get away with doing almost nothing. But in a team of two or three, it's going to show. So teams of two or three are more productive than teams of six or seven. And with more than that, you gain almost nothing from adding an extra person. Basically, it's better to subdivide teams down if you can. The research of Meredith Belbin, probably the world authority on teams concluded that the best size of team for solving problems is four. Smaller than that and you don't get as many ideas. Larger than that, you start getting these communication inefficiencies. After we've made the team the optimum size, the next thing to keep an eye on is how the skills and roles of the team members fit together. And the pieces will never fit together perfectly. And the sizes of the pieces will vary. So it's almost impossible to get fairness when the work gets divided up. And this gets worse when you have different types of job coming along. So sometimes there'll be lots of work for the detailed person, or the creative person. And other times, very little. So they may swing from overloaded to bored. And I think this is just built in to the nature of teams. But it does need to be monitored and managed. I think there are five things you can do in order to make the best of this difficult situation. Number one is always keep the team to the smallest size it can be. Number two is to have regular meetings, where you all tell each other what you're working on. Number three is make sure that each person has measurable accountability for some part of the task so that they can't hide. Number four is to monitor how busy each person is, and try to re-distribute the work to keep it fair. And number five, train people for several skills as much as possible. So they can cover for each other when relative workloads vary. So how big is your team? And have you noticed these communication inefficiencies happening? Could you reduce the size of the team? Or subdivide it? And do you have regular meetings? Could there be clearer accountability for each person? And have you got as much multi-skilling as possible for everyone in your team?

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