Yuska and punched her in the face! Yuska retreated. For good measure, Mbeli took a bite out of Yuska’s shoulder. It was a cat fight.
After three months of separate introductions the group was finally allowed to be together. Yuska chose an interesting strategy to retain her dominant position. At the time of the group first being together, Yuska was in oestrous—the sexually receptive stage of her cycle. For the three years since Rigo had joined the group as the silverback, Yuska had shown no sexual interest in him and for that whole time had refused to mate with him. Suddenly, with the introduction of Mbeli, she changed her strategy and presented herself for mating. She has continued to regularly mate with Rigo even when she is not in oestrous.
Even within a month of Mbeli’s arrival the keepers observed a positive impact on the culture of the group. Rigo’s position was enhanced and Yuska’s much reduced. The females were less inclined to support Yuska so she was no longer able to run the show. It seemed to be a more stable, harmonious group. Rigo was more in charge, which is what a gorilla group expects from its silverback.
It sounds like just another day in the office, right? Well, maybe not in every respect. Damian makes the point that the objective of this gorilla team is simple and straightforward: to reproduce. Yet even such a natural objective gets complicated and derailed by the dynamics and politics of the group.
IMPLICATIONS OF THIS INSTINCT FOR LEADERS
Here’s a snapshot of what we have learned about the family element of the instinct of social belonging.
1 We gain our identity as a member of a small intimate group of around seven people.
2 We carry this as if family model with us into our workplaces.
3 Yet our work team cannot really be family—that’s the preserve of direct family members.
4 Hence a leader in modern workplaces is challenged with a paradox of leading a family size group which desires to act as if it is family but can never be and should not be so.
There are significant practical implications of our natural family condition which, if incorporated into your toolkit, will make managing people easier.
Implication 1. Team size
The size of a team determines whether it is set to be functional or dysfunctional. To be designed to be functional, teams should number around seven members.
If a manager is leading a team much smaller than five or larger than nine, it’s useful to know that there will be some unnatural challenges.
A small team of, say, two people is too small for those two individuals to feel a sense of belonging. Typically, small teams suffer a sense of isolation. Small teams should be merged or at least connected at the next level so that individuals have a sense of belonging to a family-sized unit.
Teams can be too big. If a team is larger than nine people then the team is too large for people to have an intimate sense of connection and too large for the manager to lead.
In some organisations teams swell to 15, 20 or even 30 people. Be aware that such over-sized teams create a foundation of dysfunction. The leader is not able to spend the necessary time with each person. The team will struggle to deliver outputs. Team members become frustrated that the leader can’t respond to their requests fast enough. Factions or cliques will emerge in the team. This group is way beyond the size with which we bond intimately.
A group of middle managers of a manufacturing business shared with me their recent experience. They had teams of around 30 people reporting to their team leaders. The teams were structured around this size in order to save ‘unproductive headcount’ of managers. The assumption was that because the work of the 30 staff was routine production work, the structure could work. Frustrated with the low level of productivity in the group and after trying a range of possible solutions, the managers finally changed the structure and appointed team leaders to lead teams of around seven. Instantly the facility became more productive. Decision-making sped up, production obstacles were removed, groups were more efficiently in touch with each other and resources were more appropriately allocated.
The ideal is seven, plus or minus two, meaning between five and nine. This team size applies irrespective of the level of the organisation. A senior team of 14 will be too big for the executive members to gain a sense of intimate connection. Cliques will most likely form. A team this size will have duplicated functions and a width of coverage too broad for the head of the team to sufficiently cope. For senior executives a team size of five to nine is functional for another reason—such a team will naturally represent the range of functions that the CEO will need a line of sight to. These roles will represent the voices the CEO needs at the table for effective decision making. If the CEO has many more than nine voices, it can almost be guaranteed that voices will be duplicated and energies diluted. With such a large team the CEO will also be trying to skate across too many subjects and the operation will be hampered.
Flight Centre is a global organisation employing around 14,000 people in the travel industry. The company is regularly awarded Best Employer status in countries where it operates. One reason for its ongoing success is that it bases its organisational structure on human instinct principles which it calls ‘family, village and tribe’. In its retail travel stores, call centres and central functions, Flight Centre has teams of no more than seven staff. According to the Human Resources Director, Michael Murphy, ‘Any time we compromised the rule of seven and even had eight staff in a store, productivity dropped. From painful experience, we will not compromise team size, our family team, of seven in number. This family unit is a foundation of our business, both in terms of the connection of people and the accountability of managers.’
For Flight Centre, if a store is generating business that justifies more than seven people then the company opens another store in the same neighbourhood. The company will pay the extra infrastructure costs of a second store rather than suffer the predictable decline in productivity that accompanies a team larger than seven.
Flight Centre wisely knows that it’s impossible for staff to connect to a human group of 14,000. However, they also know that they can have a highly engaged group of staff if there is a strong sense of belonging. If staff members are highly connected at the local level within their team of seven and in their village of around 80 people then the company has a band of loyal, energetic people. The company has replicated this model around the world and attributes its growth, stability and sustainability to this principle.
Implication 2. Role of leader
The human instinct to connect with a small group of others gives clarity to the critical role of the team leader.
The natural condition for human family groups is to have a leader. This need for a leader of work teams applies irrespective of whether you manage a team of front-line sales staff, call centre operators or lead the top team. The team leader’s task is to be the effective leader of a family-sized group.
This role as the leader of a group of humans is both empowering and also carries with it obligations. It is indeed empowering for a leader to know that their people want someone in the leader role. Our natural model for our small group of intimates is to have a leader. The single leader model is still present in the natural family of mum and dad because both parents need to work as one and not allow mum to be played off against dad and vice versa—in functional families the two parents act ‘as if ‘ there was one leader/parent.
New managers are often uncertain of their role and power, so this insight should help them to have increased confidence in their leadership role. The team wants and needs them to be the leader. It also helps leaders promoted from within the team to
