Is your executive team too big?

We do a lot of executive team coaching with all sizes of teams including some with as many as 16 executives.  The larger the team, the likelier the question comes up “Is our team too big”?  If you’re asking yourself the question, the answer is often – Yes.

To have your team truly operate as team vs a working group, its essential that the team has clear goals for the team to work together to achieve. Patrick Lencioni describes a team as a small group of people who work together to achieve a goal.  He suggests that when your team gets over 8-12 people, it may no longer fit this “small group” definition and become very difficult to stay as a single team. 

What happens when you have too many people? In our experience, we hear from teams that they are experiencing “cliques” or a “team within a team”. This can be expected and its part of what makes us human. We need to have more intimate and connected relationships to collaborate with each other to achieve meaningful goals.

Here are five challenges we’ve witnessed in large executive teams: 

Challenge #1 – Complexity of relationships

We got curious about how much complexity adding each person brings into the team and discovered a formula to calculate: (R) is [ N x (N-1) / 2 ]. Where the number of relationships grows dramatically with each new team member.

5 Member Team = 10 relationships

10 Member Team = 45 relationships

15 Member Team = 105 relationships

Too many relationships to develop and maintain create risk of team dysfunction. With 105 unique relationships in a 15-member team, that amount of complexity gives you 105 situations where trust, candid dialogue, commitment, accountability, and alignment can break down. The risks often outweigh the benefits.

Challenge #2 – Debate and decision making suffer

To get each perspective to be heard, understood, and challenged takes an incredible amount of time. People either move to dominating to be heard or becoming passive and not speaking up. Debate takes too much time and decisions get kicked to future meetings.  Many true debates and decisions happen in the meeting after the meeting in small groups.  People start to believe they are being intentionally kept out of the loop.

Challenge #3 – Lost accountability

With so many individuals and unique relationships, it’s hard for team members to hold each other accountable especially when it comes to alignment and behavioural accountability. The burden falls on the leader of the team.

Challenge #4 – Meeting coordination

Competing calendars for so many people, coordinating a meeting where everyone can attend becomes a colossal feat. Unexpected issues come up and meetings frequently have multiple members missing or are constantly rescheduling wreaking havoc on everyone’s time management.

Challenge #5 – Too many direct reports

The leader of the team has too many direct reports to provide any substantial development, mentorship, accountability, direction etc. Making enough time to do so well takes them away from other strategic work and impacts succession.

If you’re committed to having a large team, you’ll need to work extra hard to keep your team functioning at a high level.

Intentional sub-teams require transparency and intention.

Think about a board of directors model.  In order to advance the work of the board, they have sub-committees of small groups who do the work and come back to the larger team with their findings and recommendations. With a well-functioning board, the members ask the sub-committee critical thinking questions and, unless they find any red flags, trust the work of the team and approve the recommended decision or action.

Meeting Hygiene

Stay away from “update meetings”. They are boring, and with 15 people in the room each person gets 4 minutes of airtime or less in a 60 minute meeting.  That doesn’t leave room for dialogue and debate.  Think about how to make meetings something that no one wants to miss because its where robust discussion happens and decisions get made. Ensure your agenda is clear on not only the topic but the outcomes too.  Each agenda item should have a clear outcome defined: Decision, Next Steps, or Key Learnings which will help the group or meeting chair drive the conversation forward and avoid rabbit holes.

Get clear on decision making

Be clear when you’re soliciting input and when you are discussing to decide and what the decision options are.  Who is making the decision and how. One person, a small group, consensus, majority rules, unanimous agreement or something else?

Set advanced meeting dates

For meetings of the whole group, set the dates ahead for the whole year and identify norms around attendance and expectations for when a leader cannot attend.

If you’re pondering the size of your team and the impact on your effectiveness, you might need to make some changes.  Committing to actively managing these five challenges with intention and transparency can help if you can’t make the team smaller. And, if you can redesign the team to be smaller, do it.