Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (23 page)

T
hanks to marriage and business partnerships, pairings are extremely common in daily life. Trios, because they are so volatile, are much rarer. But so are teams of four, and perhaps for just the opposite reason: because they are so stable. Most of the successful small teams we encounter, however, range in size from five to nine members—what we call 7±2 teams. These 7±2 teams show up almost everywhere: corporate boards of directors, partners in venture capital firms, small law and medical partnerships, sports (baseball, basketball, volleyball, rowing, team handball, water polo, Ultimate Frisbee), the number of key players in romantic comedies and sitcoms (think
Friends
,
Cheers
,
Designing Women
,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
,
Newhart
—the list is almost endless), rock bands (the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Temptations), entrepreneurial start-up teams, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the United States Supreme Court. Walt Disney’s founding animation team was known as the Nine Old Men. Look closely at any
modern institution, and somewhere at its center, usually playing a defining role, you will almost always find a 7±2 team.

Sometimes they are there even when, on first glance, they appear not to be. For example, the most famous small team of modern times is equally famous for having four members. Yet, at almost any phase in its brief history, this team actually had anywhere from five to six members—and thus fit perfectly into the archetype of the midsize team.

The Beatles—the Fab Four—will always be John, Paul, George, and Ringo. This is the band that appears in
A Hard Day’s Night
and played on the field at Shea Stadium. And it is the band that entered with the first cohort into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is this lineup that is likely to be as immortal as any team in our time.

But the closer you look at the Beatles’ story, the more complicated the story of this team becomes. For example, during the band’s formative years, in Hamburg and Liverpool, the Beatles were mostly a
five-
member band, including the group’s original leader, Stu Sutcliffe, and Pete Best instead of Ringo Starr on drums. The same is true in the band’s later years, when it turned to Eric Clapton for guitar on one track of
The White Album
, and to Billy Preston (the so-called fifth Beatle) for keyboards for the final albums.

But even during the band’s most celebrated period, from
Meet the Beatles!
through
Sgt. Pepper’s
, the Fab Four lived up to that title only in performance. Until his early death, the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, not only played a crucial role in getting the band its recording contract but he even devised the band’s signature look. Even more important, and a fact the band itself verified, was the real “fifth Beatle,” the producer George Martin. From the tinkling harpsichord-like notes on “In My Life” to the orchestral cyclone that ends “A Day in the Life,” Martin somehow made real any outrageous musical sound the band devised. Without Brian Epstein, the world would likely have never heard of the Beatles; without
George Martin at the controls at Abbey Road Studios, it is hard to imagine how the band, for all its talent, could have progressed much beyond
Beatles for Sale
.

Examples like this suggest that, as with pairs, there is something deeply human, even genetic, about gathering in “small midsize” teams of between five and nine members. As we will see later in this chapter, this “natural” human clustering also describes “large midsize” teams of between twelve and eighteen members.

THE SWEET SPOT OF FUNCTIONALITY

Midsize teams can be characterized in a number of ways. We see them as groups that feature:

•
      
No more than two levels of leadership.

•
      
The members knowing each other on a personal basis.

But there are other characterizations as well. If you remember, Robin Dunbar describes these two groups as follows:

•
      
Five
members: the number of your most intimate friends and partners (“cliques”). Not coincidentally, five is also the number that corresponds to the limits of human short-term memory.

•
      
Fifteen
is the number of people with whom we can have deep trust in the face of almost any turn of events. Dunbar calls these “sympathy groups.”

The noted team scholar Dr. Meredith Belbin identifies small teams as being four to six members—the “sweet spot” of functionality along a continuum of “cultural messages” delivered by teams numbering from four to ten members.
¹
Thus:

•
      
Four: “We’re well-balanced in our team and good at achieving agreement.”

•
      
Five: “One of us tends to be the odd one out.”

•
      
Six: “It takes longer to reach agreement, but we get there in the end.”

•
      
Seven: “Rather too many random contributions float about.”

•
      
Eight: “People speak freely, but no one listens.”

•
      
Nine: “We could do with someone taking control.”

•
      
Ten: “We now have a leader, but their ideas are the only ones with a chance of acceptance.”

You’ll also remember, from chapter 2, that Cyril Parkinson, the inventor of the law about the growth of bureaucracies, believed that a team of eight members can never reach a consensus decision.

On the other hand, we also know from our own lives that there are a lot of highly functional eight-person teams, from Boy Scout patrols to Little League teams (minus the pitcher) to army squads. In almost all instances, teams of this size require a strong leader.

In other words, while pairs and trios may be precise in their composition of members, beyond that—as we shall see—our description of teams gets increasingly imprecise. Thus, at the entry level of the midsize team, at the moment when the “team” also becomes a “group” and adds an internal leader, the most accurate we can be in our description of it is as a team of 7±2 members. At the next level, at what we might call (using military terminology) the
squad
or
crew
level, or Dunbar’s trust/sympathy level, we are slightly more precise, at 15±3.

Beyond this, at the level of large groups, this variation grows larger in absolute numbers, but settles down at between 10 to 20 percent. Thus, the 4,500-person
division
may feature a swing in actual population of 500 members or more. However, while we will make this variation explicit for small groups, for which the swing is obvious, we will leave that variation unsaid with big teams.

Now let’s take a closer look at those two categories, 7±2 and 15±3, of midsize teams. They are of particular importance, because between them they encompass most of the world’s operational teams.

7±2 TEAMS

When you think of the word “team,” you probably see in your mind’s eye a tightly knit group of five to nine individuals. Though this visualization may have some origins in biology, it probably has more to do with the fact that almost every team you’ve ever seen on television or in the movies, or read about in a book, or joined in an online game, likely has five to nine members.

Another reason for this visualization is that old matter of human short-term memory. Just as we can typically remember only five to nine digits at a time, so too can we keep at once in our frame of interest only about that same number of characters. Think of Snow White’s seven dwarfs—of which, as shown by thousands of bar bets, most of us know only six. Or, quick: name more than seven of the Dirty Dozen
—
yeah, we thought so.
Lord of the Rings
? Four hobbits, one human, one dwarf, one elf. Akira Kurosawa understood this with
The Seven Samurai
, Lina Wertmüller with
Seven Beauties
, and Steven Vincent Benét in the story that became
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. And, of course, there’s Harry Potter and his four friends (plus the twins) at Hogwarts. Unconsciously or not, novelists and screenwriters understand this, and so they keep the number of major characters in any story down to about a half dozen. If in the course of the narrative they add one character, they compensate by losing one, or putting one in the background. As a result, whenever we encounter a small team of people in a book or onscreen, that team almost always exhibits the familiar 7±2 composition, which further reinforces that size of team in our consciousness.

But this still doesn’t fully explain why teams of this size
work
so well. If they didn’t, human beings would have long ago found an alternative and superior team size. And yet we still return to this one, so there must be some functional reason why we do.

There are several possible reasons—and the real answer probably lies in some combination of them all.

•
      
Magic Numbers:
The numbers six and seven have some interesting attributes. Six, for example, has a singular relationship with all the numbers beneath it. Thus it can encompass two trios, or three pairs—or, with a separate internal leader, a pair/trio team or even a five-member team (which still fits in the 7±2 format). That’s a lot of flexibility for a small group, and it seems to make the six-member team uniquely adaptable for its size. Meanwhile, the number seven has endless historical resonances connected with good luck. That connection to success came from somewhere, and it wasn’t the stars. If human beings hadn’t found some advantage to organizing by seven, they would have abandoned it long ago. Instead, they embraced it. Tellingly, the Egyptian pharaohs reserved the number seven to themselves (the average citizen wasn’t even allowed to use the number) and organized everything around it.

•
      
Functionality:
Groups of five to nine, and especially the larger numbers in that set, are basically the smallest teams in which you can have a dedicated internal leader as well as a distribution of tasks with more than one member assigned to each subgroup. In other words, a 7±2 team is the first team that you can actually divide up into robust groups and assign them to work on multiple tasks, in parallel, while still having someone in charge to coordinate their activities.

•
      
Communications:
Moving up through team size, the 7±2 team basically represents the last time that a team can fulfill Jeff Bezos’s “two pizza” rule: the last time that all the members of
the team can sit around a single table for a meeting, and the last time that they can all know each other both personally and on a daily basis.

•
      
Span of Control:
Remember, at seven team members, the number of points of contact among those members has already jumped to twenty-one. By nine members, it reaches thirty-six—and it starts to go vertical from there. As anyone knows who has run such a team, after about nine people in a room it is hard to personally address each member over the course of a meeting. The same is true sitting in a classroom and crouched on a battlefield—which is why the military and leadership training programs are obsessed with the concept of span of control: How many people/subordinates can you not just motivate but actually command in detail? Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. likely saved the Normandy invasion when, under fire on Utah Beach, he gathered together his commanders, showed them that they’d been landed a mile from their target beach, and announced, “We’ll start the war from here!” That decision, expressed directly to probably no more than six battalion commanders, resulted in a coordinated assault that got the US Fourth Infantry Division off the beach with a minimum of casualties.

•
      
Diversity:
It has become something of a cliché in movies, especially war movies, that whenever you have a team of individuals, it’s going to be populated by a carefully selected mixed bag of members—the country boy, the wisecracking kid from Brooklyn, the Southerner, the Hispanic kid from the Southwest, the college intellectual, and so forth. But this predictable feature is also a ham-fisted tribute to reality—which is that 7±2 teams are the smallest teams that can actually show real diversity among their members, and thus can exhibit the advantages that come with the presence of different personalities and talents.

•
      
Entrepreneurship:
The 7±2 team is synonymous with that most important phenomenon of the modern economy: the
entrepreneurial start-up. We often think of the founding teams of great tech companies as being composed of two or three people. And while that may be true for the first few weeks, when the
idea
of the company is first being formulated and the very first “angel” money is being raised, in real life (and we speak from the experience of having been involved in a number of start-ups, including eBay) start-ups do not become actual businesses until they have created an actual start-up team, of five to nine people, and, optimally, six or seven. Only then can one subteam pursue fund-raising, while the others undertake product design and development. This was true not only for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but also for some famous intrapreneurial teams, such as the one that created the Macintosh. This is the group that also typically gets the start-up to series A venture investment, and thus to the beginnings of a “real” company. As such, this group (along with the major investors) is considered the “founders.”

For these reasons, 7±2 teams are the most flexible, the quickest, and the most cohesive of all internally managed teams. They also have a sufficient number of members to exhibit real diversity, a productive division of labor, and effective mass. As such, this organizational scheme is almost infinitely flexible and can serve as a stand-alone operation (as in start-up teams), as a key component of a larger team (such as a platoon, department, or office), or, by the dozens, as the basic building block of very large organizations. These 7±2 teams can also be assembled and retired quickly and, because they feature only a single layer of management, they are simple to combine into larger organizations.