Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (24 page)

This doesn’t mean that 7±2 teams are entirely ideal. Being small, fast, and flexible is a great advantage, but in the wrong situation it can also be a serious handicap. That is, when the crunch comes, a team with only a half dozen members doesn’t have much throw
weight—and if you decide to beef up the membership at the eleventh hour, who will have time to train these new members? You? You’ll be the busiest person of all.

And how many will you add? Any more than three or four will push your team into the no-man’s-land of ten or eleven members, a size that is almost impossible for one person to manage. So that means you add either one or two people (which probably won’t be enough) or five or six, including another manager subordinate to you.

But that is a quibble. Because entrepreneurial start-ups are now the driving force of the modern global economy—and not least because these founders are so hugely rewarded in the most successful of these start-ups (they provide much of the ranks of new billionaires)—the survival of the 7±2 team is anything but at risk in the modern world. Indeed, we can expect their numbers only to grow.

Organizing and Managing 7±2 Teams

Managing a 7±2 team usually means that you are a member of that team. And while in theory that shouldn’t make a difference, in real life it always does. And so, while you are still trying to assemble the best possible team, in the back of your mind is the lingering thought that whomever you pick you will have to work with closely on a daily basis for the duration of the project.

So if you aren’t careful, subjectivity can sneak into what should be a hard-nosed, objective decision. For instance, you may not pick someone who is right for the team but whom you don’t particularly like—something that wouldn’t happen if you were an external manager. There goes diversity—and you’ll end up with a team that has a great time, agrees on just about everything, and enjoys the experience right up until the moment the project craters. It wouldn’t hurt to bring in an experienced manager to do a reality check of your work to protect yourself from that error.

You are also the keeper of the team’s milestones. You may get some assistance from others (do everything you can to get an assistant or a secretary, as it will make your job, which can be particularly onerous as the sole manager, much easier), but ultimately every milestone and celebration, from meeting an interim development target to team members’ birthdays, is your responsibility. Keep careful records and never screw up—in teams this small,
everything
is personal.

15±3 TEAMS

You have probably heard one of two 15±3 teams every day of your life. And the fact that, unless you are a hard-core fan of popular music, you know almost nothing about them is telling: both teams were created purely for effectiveness and not for fame, and they both reached the same magic number in size—the “large midsize team”—only because that grouping worked best for the task at hand.

One of these teams, based at Motown studios in Detroit, was ultimately nicknamed the Funk Brothers. Other than those of the bassist, James Jamerson, and the bandleader, Joe Hunter, it’s unlikely that you know any of their names—even if you saw
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
, the 2002 documentary on them. And yet, as Motown’s studio musicians from 1959 to 1972, the Funk Brothers, in the words of the documentary, likely “played on more number one hits than the Beatles, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys combined.” Indeed, every Motown hit during that era, from Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, to the Supremes, the Temptations, and Marvin Gaye, featured the Funk Brothers—who at any given time in the studio numbered about thirteen members.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, in Los Angeles, another
collection of studio musicians—of almost exactly the same size—was being labeled with the moniker the Wrecking Crew. The crew may not have had quite as many number one hits as the Funk Brothers did, but many of its members went on to much greater fame: Glen Campbell, Dr. John, Leon Russell, bassist Carol Kaye, Sonny Bono, and Frank Sinatra’s drummer, Hal Blaine. If the Funk Brothers get credit for “I Heard It through the Grapevine” and
What’s Going On
, the Wrecking Crew owns “Good Vibrations” and
Pet Sounds
.

Why don’t pop music fans know more about the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew? One reason is that part of their job description was to stay behind the scenes—it was the Four Tops or the original Byrds who went on tour and onstage, not these folks (though sometimes they were in the music pit). But another reason was their sheer numbers; the roll of names is beyond the memories of casual fans.

The same is true of modern progressive rock assemblages like the Polyphonic Spree or Arcade Fire—can you name more than one or two of their members? How about Parliament/Funkadelic: you can probably name George Clinton and bassist Bootsy Collins, and maybe guitarist Eddie Hazel (“Maggot Brain”). And yet all of these groups, allowed to seek their natural size without outside influence, either began with or quickly reached twelve to eighteen members.

Needless to say, music isn’t the only place where the 15±3 team is regularly seen. One place where its appearance may have had an even greater long-term impact than on popular music is in the invention of new technologies: Microsoft’s founding team and the Apple Macintosh team consisted of twelve and thirteen members, respectively.

Thus even in the furthest corners of popular music and digital technology, natural group sizes still assert themselves.

15±3 Teams—The Organization

15±3 teams are the smallest teams that can actually divide their labor and still have dedicated management for each resulting subteam. This formulation offers some real advantages; in particular, it means that those subteams can truly operate independently and not have to wait on a single manager racing back and forth among those teams making command decisions. And, of course, the presence of a dedicated manager/leader makes a considerable difference—now you don’t just have a fellow team member occasionally stepping back from his or her own work to make, usually under time pressure and with limited knowledge, critical command decisions.

The first teams with real
heft
are 15±3 teams. A full-size 15±3 team, with eighteen members, is more than three times the size of the smallest 7±2 team. That’s a lot of firepower to throw at any task—especially when the team has a dedicated management structure that can keep the team continuously on task, and is trained to both bring out the best in each team member and maintain high morale. There’s a reason that the platoon is the essential fighting unit.

The 15±3 team features both a true division of labor and a hierarchy of management. As such, it is the first true
organization team
. In particular, it exhibits several characteristics not found in the smaller teams, including:

•
      
Hierarchal Management:
With the 15±3 team we see for the first time a second layer of management, a kind of proto–executive office that is distinct from the rest of the team. This also means that, for the first time, there is a distinct chain of command, in which a leader is obliged to work through subordinates rather than dealing with the entire team’s membership. In fact, because of the limitation of the human span of control, it would be extremely difficult for the team leader to deal with the
entire team at one time, beyond a speech or other form of mass messaging.

•
      
Professional Leadership:
Up to this point, team leaders are also typically active team members. That’s why in the military, 7±2 leadership is given to noncommissioned officers—that is, sergeants—who are expected to join in the work, including combat, if necessary. Command of military 15±3 team–type units—
platoons
—is typically given to an officer, usually a second lieutenant or a warrant officer, who has been trained specifically for the task of leadership. (Military platoons are typically larger than commercial 15±3 teams because they add a third 7±2 squad and have a larger command team, including senior sergeants and a weapons team—none of which is, needless to say, usually necessary in the business world.) By the same token, business 15±3 teams are typically led by a professional manager (at this level the equivalent of a second lieutenant: a young MBA) whose job description all but keeps him or her from participating in the actual work of the team. Rather, that person’s task, perhaps with the aid of an assistant, is to manage the team—or more precisely, the subteam leaders—full-time, continuously monitor the health and performance of the team, and act as the communications node to the rest of the organization.

In the corporate world, 15±3 teams typically take the form of a sales office, business department, manufacturing line section, or, way up the org chart, the CEO’s executive team (C-level executives and group leaders). In R&D, the 15±3 team is usually found in applications, where an original invention is spun out to a full working prototype that can be passed on to manufacturing.

In the world of entrepreneurs, a 15±3 team is usually the size of a start-up as it completes its series A round of venture capital, that is, its first injection of professional capital at the point that it has a demonstrable product.

In an elementary school, a 15±3 team is the teaching staff of fourteen teachers (K–6, two classes each) plus the principal and the vice principal. In a department store, it is an individual department’s sales staff plus the department head. And the list goes on and on. Next time you get your car repaired or washed, look around. Same with your dry cleaner, or your local coffee shop (all shifts). Anywhere you have a small-business operation, usually dedicated to a single, vertical task, and led by an owner or a full-time manager, you are likely to have a variant of a 15±3 team.

It can truly be said that small-business America (and most of the rest of the world) runs on 15±3 teams. Once again, these teams come in several forms:

•
      
Monolithic Teams:
Monolithic teams are the rarest 15±3 teams, and for good reason. Essentially, these are teams in which everyone reports directly to the boss. Since this number of people is well out of the effective span of control of most leaders, these teams typically have a hidden structure that divides up the leadership—such as the owner’s spouse who manages personnel and bookkeeping, the veteran employee who serves as the de facto platoon sergeant, the boss’s secretary who is the real manager, and so on. Traditional small companies (for instance, those in service or small-scale manufacturing) sometimes exhibit this structure—which usually limits their growth.

•
      
Professional Teams:
Think of a real estate office. It’s filled with a dozen or so Realtors—all of them trained professionals managing their own private rosters of clients—managed by one or two more experienced agents. There is also an agency owner (usually with a secretary) who handles the building’s lease, MLS subscriptions, advertising and signage, and commissions. Similar structures can be found in law offices (in which the firm’s owner spends more time on administration and client relations than practicing law), doctor’s offices, accounting offices, insurance
offices, title companies, and so forth. In each case, the organizational structure is minimal because the team members are quasi-independent but still need an umbrella organization to achieve their maximum productivity.

•
      
Manufacturing Teams:
Small businesses specializing in sequential production activities (custom building, repair, machining, prototyping) typically organize their 15±3 team as a number of small subteams of two, three, and even 7±2, with one or two supervisors and a boss-salesperson (along with a contract bookkeeper and other outside vendors). Watch reality TV on any given night and you’ll see these teams building motorcycles, repairing guns, or restoring cars. In real life, just visit any machine shop and you’ll see this organizational model played out before your eyes.

•
      
Development Teams:
Now we enter the world of technology and new product creation and management. The 15±3 member development team is something of a compromise in this world. They are bigger than the typical 7±2 code-writer team we think of in software development, the kind of frat house team we see on television (
Silicon Valley
) and in movies, and in official corporate histories of companies like Google and Facebook. They are also bigger than the standard virtual team that is handing off work in eight-hour shifts to individuals or pairs around the world. And, because of their size, 15±3 development teams can never match the cohesiveness or the flexibility of the smaller design team.

That said, the 15±3 team offers its own advantages in product development. For one thing, it can be faster in certain situations. Code is code, and the more people you have working in parallel, the faster it can be written—a crucial time-to-market advantage when competition is intense—and with a 15±3 team, you don’t need to add the risk of contracting out the work to teams of code
writers in other countries. In addition, you can divide up the work among twice as many subteams, or conversely, you can double the manpower in each of the same number of teams. Finally, and most important, the presence of a professional manager who is inside the team but not buried in its work makes for much better coordination between the subteams, better continuous monitoring of the team’s progress toward its goals, and (because smaller teams have a much greater risk of becoming isolated and insular) better contact with the outside world.

As we’ve already noted, the rule of the thumb for teams is to go with the smallest team for the task. But here we make a—sort of—exception. If you find yourself with a project that will demand a nine- (or even worse, a ten- or eleven-) member team, seriously consider bumping up the team size to 15±3—and use those additional members to implement an internal management superstructure to the project. The added cost is almost always worth it.