Sizing it up!

Effective team management requires more than just people skills or even domain knowledge. There is some inevitable number crunching that every manager has to necessarily engage in. How many people should you have in your team? Who can collaborate with whom? How many groups can work on a given task?

These questions are unnerving. However, one can find solace in the fact that the challenge to effectively manage a team is an ancient one and that many leaders have walked the path, providing some crucial evidence in favor of small and manageable teams. During Roman times, a squad contained a maximum of eight soldiers, who could fit into a single tent.

This not only enabled them to remain with each other at all times, but it was also easier to command them effectively. This thumb rule works effectively even today. It can be said without a doubt that an effective team can effortlessly outdo even the most brilliant one among them working in isolation.

That said, the graph of progress is not directly proportional to the number of people involved in a team. In fact, after a certain point, it gets adversely affected with the increase in the team size. A small team on the other hand may not necessarily generate desired results at all times.

Niketh C, a software programme developer, says, “If the programme requires that you work on different technologies, we need a large team as the work demands various specialisations. A small team, on the other hand, will only increase the workload and the stress resulting from it”.

A careful look at a team size and the resulting permutations and combinations of interactions and communications can give one a better insight into why bigger doesn’t not necessarily translate into stronger. For instance, a team of three can interact with each other in six ways while a team of six can have almost 15 ways of working with each other.

Before you may think, these are manageable numbers, consider a team of 32 members. They can form almost 1,024 connections, which means there are 1,024 routes of communications the members should use to effectively interact with each other. That kind of math doesn’t seem fair.

Somum Shah, project manager agrees with this. “Working with four to five people can bring out the best results. It is easy to delegate work and keep a tab of updates. Also it is possible to pay individual attention to them and there is lesser scope of conflict among the team members,” he says.

If this math is extrapolated to fit a company with 1,500 team members, the number of possible interconnections arising out of them reaches a whopping 2.25 million. Now the problem of communication becomes obvious. But why is it so hard to maintain effective communication as the number increases? It has less to do with management skills than it has to do with the limitation of the human mind.

According to an article in Forbes, even the most gregarious person can maintain a consistent communication with four or five people. Beyond this number, the lines of communication increase and this pushes the average person’s mental capacity to contain the copious amount of the resulting information.

Even individuals with photographic memories and perfect communication skills can stumble beyond a point. Technology-enabled social networking has definitely made communication easier but it has not yet provided a solution to the mammoth resulting from large numbers that multiply quicker than technology can conquer.

Swathi Rao, a project manager with Facebook, sums it up effectively, “Individuals in small teams can gel well with each other. It takes a longer time for people in larger groups to break the ice”. Managing people is a human skill. It requires one to make effective use of language, empathy, planning and time. But that is only till math interferes and upsets what should have been a much simpler and linear equation.

By:Mythili Sankara