What is the difference between managing a small team and a large team?
As a manager, it is essential to work closely with your team. Monitor team dynamics and identify issues, determining whether to resolve them yourself or let the team handle them. Provide timely feedback to coach your members and act as a mentor to help them enhance their skills and abilities.
In a small team with fewer than ten members, a manager can hold weekly one-on-one meetings with junior staff and bi-weekly sessions with senior members, promoting a clear understanding of their satisfaction. However, in a larger team of 30 to 40 members, maintaining productivity, high standards, and team motivation becomes difficult due to the limited time available for individual engagement.
In a small team, you focus on limited scopes and specific parts of a system, allowing you to understand in detail the processes and logic behind each task your team members undertake. In contrast, with a larger team, you must manage broader, cross-functional scopes while dealing with time constraints.
How to organize a large team productively?
This is the structure of a military organization.
A squad is the smallest unit in the organization. When members exceed the limit, a new unit is created until the maximum level is reached. Each unit has a leader who manages members and reports statistics to the higher leader.
If ten people report to you, you’re a squad lead. A platoon lead manages 1 to 3 squads, with 3 direct reports overseeing 16–44 members. The platoon leader executes and observes through 3 squad leaders instead of working closely with each member.
Stepping up in management requires defining norms, strategizing, planning for your unit, and daily monitoring.
- Define positions explicitly and responsibilities so that every member knows exactly what to do.
- Define the way of working; it serves as a guideline to help members collaborate effectively with others in the unit.
- The boundary of the unit’s scope should be kept clean to avoid overlap of responsibility. This way, unit leaders can make decisions quickly or request help from another unit if needed.
- Organize the documents centrally, store all documents related to the units, and ensure every member knows where to find a document quickly when needed. Like GitLab, they create an employee handbook and include everything in it.
- Define and share the unit planning with every member. Clearly outline the goals, explain why we have them, and demonstrate their impacts to inspire the unit mission for every member.
- Set up a monitoring system to assess all units’ system health and performance. Each unit leader must manage their scope and be hands-on whenever an issue arises.
- Set a schedule to meet 1:1 with the unit leaders, sync up on the unit status, and provide timely feedback to encourage all units to proceed together.
- Request the unit leaders to prepare and book sharing sessions for the entire unit; this will highlight the unit’s achievements and challenges, including lessons learned, to help every member avoid similar issues in the future.
- Set performance reviews in a timely manner to evaluate unit and member performance and propose improvement plans.
- Set skip-level meetings allow you to hold 1:1 sessions with any members in your unit, aiming to understand their status, what they need, and what problems they have. You can then sync up with their manager to improve the process.
The above is just an internal unit organization; you must also manage stakeholders as a manager. In this post, I mention the unit organization for large teams; the next post will dive into stakeholder management.
