Every manager reaches a point where “the way we’ve always done things” suddenly stops working. Often, this happens right after a hiring surge. Every blend of circumstances is unique but there is a common (and very powerful) anthropological effect that is almost always in the mix somewhere. That effect is based on how our brains model social groups.
The Fractal Nature of Trust
Human groups don’t scale linearly. We scale in ‘circles of intimacy’, much like the ripples on a pond. Each circle requires a completely different communication architecture to survive. Intuitively, you know that if you try to manage a 50-person department the same way you manage a 5-person ‘war room’, things will go quickly awry.
This intuition is supported by the literature around the psychology of groups. When coaching leaders, we often find it helpful to explore the (rough) hierarchy of group sizes and their corresponding dynamics…
The Core (The 5-Person Unit)
This is the inner circle. It’s characterized by high-intensity support and daily interaction. These groups should have near-total autonomy because a huge part of their value comes from their ability to move and adapt quickly through a high level of mutual trust and connection. Detailed management from outside the group is far more likely to slow it down than to improve its work.
The Squad (The 15-Person Unit)
Often called the ‘sympathy group’, this is the limit of deep collaboration. You can still hold the context of everyone’s work in your head (so you have direct understanding and empathy for what it’s like to be in their shoes). This is the classic two-pizza team (two pizzas being enough to feed the team). Once you move beyond 15, you can no longer rely on everyone knowing roughly everything.
The Tribe (The 50-Person Unit)
In our experience, this is often the most volatile threshold for a growing company. At 50 people, the ‘camaraderie gap’ begins to set in. You can no longer maintain a personal bond with everyone in the organization. This is where pernicious effects like ‘social loitering’ frequently begin (individuals feel like they can safely disappear into the crowd). It’s also where we often see the first glimpses of us-vs-them silos
The Village (The 150-Person Unit)
This is Dunbar’s number - a well-known limit of human social processing. You might know everyone’s name and face, but you don’t really know their life circumstances, habits, beliefs or ways of working. Organizations at this size must transition from being person-led to mission-led. You are no longer bonded by relationships and a sense of mutual regard. Instead, the team’s cohesion comes from a shared identity and purpose.
Navigating The Thresholds
Understanding the hierarchy of social groups is helpful because it allows us to better tune how (and when) we shift organisational communication and management patterns. This raises the obvious question, “what should those shifts be?”...
Formalize Accountability: Once you approach a 50-person tribe, the ability of the group to resolve conflicts bottom-up evaporates. Formal accountability and leadership are essential to avoid paralysis when people disagree. Expecting a 60-person team to ‘just figure it out’ isn’t empowering, it’s negligent.
Build Focus: An efficient 150-person organization is, in reality, a network of many 15-person squads. In highly amicable, high-trust startups there is a strong instinct to have everyone involved in everything. One of the things we repeatedly find ourselves helping such teams adopt is a ruthless attitude to compartmentalization. Focus avoids meeting bloat and conversational paralysis. Managers should foster effective, efficient communication between the squads, not force them to act as a giant, slow-moving blob.
Ritual Care: To extend the previous point a little, any ritual or artifact designed to synchronize the ‘blob’ must be carefully weighed against the slow-down / distraction effects it has on the squads. Weekly all-hands meetings for 150-person organizations don’t generate a sense of community. They just create management overhead and drain productivity.
Radiate Context: As you cross the 50-person Tribe threshold, the founder’s brain becomes a bottleneck. In a 5-person Unit, context is ambient because everyone sees and hears almost everything. At 150 people, context must be manufactured. If you only delegate tasks, squads will constantly stall because they lack the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.
Work Harder At Relationships: Humans are tribal. It’s very old, very deep software that makes us prioritize our squad over our village. Warring factions spring seemingly out of nowhere even in organizations where everyone seems kind, curious and obliging. If you are going to invest in rituals to link the cells of the network together, make sure some of them create deeper bonds between the humans in different circles.
It’s an uncomfortable truth that our brains are poorly-configured to manage the reality of modern organisations. Evolution built us for the hunt, the campfire, and the 15-person group. Every time your company crosses one of the above-described thresholds, you’re asking your people to operate further beyond the limits of that ancient wiring. The organizations who scale successfully are the ones who tackle that reality head-on.
If you’re a leader looking for support as your organisation scales, we can support you through our 1-on-1 coaching service which provides a custom blend of coaching, mentorship and advice depending on your specific needs.