There’s another aspect that the author doesn’t touch upon that seems to materialise when a team reaches a certain size - politics.
For whatever reason, whenever you have more than about seven people in a team (in my experience, anyway), office politics seem to appear as an emergent phenomenon, and instead of people pulling together to a common goal they’re suddenly trying to undermine one another.
My best theory as to the why is that too many direct reports result in vying for attention of a manager, and people rapidly realise that outperforming others in their team doesn’t work nearly as well as throwing shade at one another.
Our solution was to constantly rotate - task oriented teams formed and dissolved on a per-case basis. This broke the cycle of power-brokering, and limited the fallout from whatever petty drama was manifesting this time.
For whatever reason, whenever you have more than about seven people in a team (in my experience, anyway), office politics seem to appear as an emergent phenomenon, and instead of people pulling together to a common goal they’re suddenly trying to undermine one another.
My best theory as to the why is that too many direct reports result in vying for attention of a manager, and people rapidly realise that outperforming others in their team doesn’t work nearly as well as throwing shade at one another.
Our solution was to constantly rotate - task oriented teams formed and dissolved on a per-case basis. This broke the cycle of power-brokering, and limited the fallout from whatever petty drama was manifesting this time.