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madaxe_again 2 days ago

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.

jodelamo 2 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.

This just sounds like a more deeply rooted work culture problem to me.

sillystu04 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I suspect it's more of a human nature problem. Perhaps a good work culture might allow you to delay its oncoming slightly past 7 people - but eventually all large social groups get political dynamics.

madaxe_again 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yep - I mean, to some extent, he’s right, as the problem was that there ended up being a perceived divide between team leads and teams - so with the rotating teams everyone who wanted to got to have a go at wearing the team lead hat, which both allowed people an opportunity to interface directly with the big bosses on the regular and feel seen (even though we were very much hands on with everyone anyway), and to understand that herding cats wasn’t as much fun as it looked like from the outside.