Podcast EP 128 | Is Your Leadership Team Too Big?

Is your lead­er­ship team too big?

There’s a real chal­lenge that comes with hav­ing too many peo­ple in a meet­ing or on a team. Some lead­ers want to be all-inclu­sive and can end up with too many peo­ple in the room, or oth­ers can end up with too few people.

Each of these can come with a set of sec­ond-order con­se­quences that can neg­a­tive­ly affect the effec­tive­ness of the team. And the per­for­mance of the business.

The chal­lenge here is that the lead­er­ship team nat­u­ral­ly expands in most com­pa­nies for deep­er insights into the busi­ness, more exper­tise, buy-in and their own devel­op­ment. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is a chal­lenge to un-invite and these larg­er teams can become ineffective.

In this pod­cast episode, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles dis­cuss def­i­n­i­tions of exec­u­tive teams and lead­er­ship teams, and the guides you should use for max­i­mum effectiveness.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies, awe­some com­pa­nies that go for a long time. And Brad and I take a lot of pride in help­ing peo­ple to build those awe­some com­pa­nies. I’m Kevin Lawrence here in just out­side of Kelow­na, in a place called peach­land British Colum­bia today. And Brad, my great friend is Down Under in Perth, Aus­tralia, Brad, how was the day so far?

Brad Giles 00:40

It’s pret­ty good. It’s off to a very good start. And it’s quite ear­ly here in the morn­ing. And yeah, things are well.

Kevin Lawrence 00:47

And I’m good. I’m wrap­ping up my day, a very busy day today. But it’s a Mon­day I’m record­ing this. And it’s just a full on day since 8am. And we’re now at 4pm. And cou­ple more hours left. So what’s the what’s the word or the phrase, the thought of the day? What have you got?

Brad Giles 01:08

So there’s this, there’s this thing going around called Qui­et quit­ting. Right now, when I was a lead, we used to call it just slack­ing off. Yes, we used to just call it slack­ing off, right? There’s this, there’s this, I’ll call it a move­ment in a very loose and dis­re­spect­ful way. Where peo­ple, they’ve, they’ve men­tal­ly quit their job, but they’re only going to do the absolute bare min­i­mum. And I recent­ly was kind of look­ing at that and learn­ing a lit­tle bit about that. So yeah. Qui­et quit­ting, not a pos­i­tive thing. But when you man­age peo­ple, you can man­age the min­i­mum hire.

Kevin Lawrence 01:50

Well, mine was flex­i­bil­i­ty. And, you know, work­ing with entre­pre­neur­ial com­pa­nies all the time, things are always chang­ing. Yeah. And if you like a straight lane, and pre­dictable, every­thing, work­ing with entre­pre­neur­ial com­pa­nies isn’t a great thing. Because there’s all kinds of stuff where you got to be on the fly and ad lib. So I like flex­i­bil­i­ty. And I was remind­ed because one of the CEOs that I worked with, were chat­ting the oth­er day, and he does­n’t like to make deci­sions unless he has to, or con­strain­ing deci­sions, yeah, likes, let things roll and see how they work out, which allows a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty. So flex­i­bil­i­ty is very dif­fer­ent than your qui­et quit­ting, because flex­i­bil­i­ty is also great for team mem­bers, you can work from home, you could work, you know, in the office, you could work, you know, how­ev­er you would like to. So peo­ple love flex­i­bil­i­ty in lots of ways. And some peo­ple don’t. But those qui­et quit­ting, peo­ple have way too much flex­i­bil­i­ty in those com­pa­nies, if they can get away with that. That’s a whole oth­er thing. So we want you know, we want flex­i­bil­i­ty, not to the point of qui­et quit­ting. So what do we what are we? What are we jump­ing into today?

Brad Giles 03:04

What’s the right size for a lead­er­ship team? Or put anoth­er way — Is your lead­er­ship team too big? Maybe your lead­er­ship team is too small. It could be maybe your lead­er­ship team is just you and you’re the genius with 1000 helpers. But what’s the size of a lead­er­ship team? Some­times, you know, we can get into some rab­bit holes of awe­some prob­lems where a new per­son comes on. And maybe part of the deal is that we’ll give them an invi­ta­tion to join the lead­er­ship team, or we’re form­ing a lead­er­ship team. And we think, Oh, we def­i­nite­ly have to get Mary on board. You know, she’s in an area where we need her. So what I guess we’re try­ing to do is to take away the per­son­al­i­ties and just talk about some of the dynam­ics of a lead­er­ship team, how they work, and yeah, maybe is yours the right size?

Kevin Lawrence 04:03

And it’s basi­cal­ly what do you need? What do you not need? And it’s real­ly inter­est­ing, because nobody does make a dis­tinc­tion between words that we use, I would say an every one’s got their own, but what I call an exec­u­tive team is the direct reports to a CEO. That’s not so you could just call them CEOs direct reports or exec­u­tive team. Lead­er­ship Team is that team plus usu­al­ly a hand­ful of oth­er peo­ple that are either super valu­able con­trib­u­tors to the dis­cus­sions in deci­sions or in a depart­ment that is real­ly crit­i­cal. And so basi­cal­ly, the lead­er­ship team is gen­er­al­ly the CEOs direct reports plus a few of those peo­ple’s direct reports. Yeah, and it can range from sev­en to 25 peo­ple depend pend­ing on how it goes in that group, that lead­er­ship team, they would nor­mal­ly be involved in your annu­al strate­gic plan­ning and your quar­ter­ly plan­ning, reset meet­ings, they might be involved in your longer month­ly meet­ings, some­times that group morphs to be the in the week­ly meet­ing with the CEO. Right? Not always, some­times the CEO has an exec­u­tive team only meet­ing but some­times that larg­er team, but this is the core thought lead­er­ship deci­sion mak­ing team of the busi­ness and for sure they’re togeth­er at the quar­ter­ly and annu­al strat­e­gy meet­ings and plus some oth­er strate­gic things in between.

Brad Giles 05:39

I sup­pose for lis­ten­ers, don’t get hung up on the the nam­ing. It’s more think about the peo­ple who are mak­ing the deci­sions, the key peo­ple, they come togeth­er as a group. What is this is talk­ing about the func­tion­al­i­ty of that group? And as do you get to a point too small or too big, where it’s a kind of a prob­lem around that?

Kevin Lawrence 06:02

There’s one com­pa­ny that I saw, and that lead­er­ship team that made all the deci­sions was two peo­ple. Yeah, in an orga­ni­za­tion of the size that they were, it was absolute­ly too small, but it was very effi­cient. And that’s the ben­e­fit, that you can deal with every­thing. Like, you know, if we had a com­pa­ny with, you know, 400 employ­ees. And, you know, you and I were to keep peo­ple run­ning it, we could make all the strate­gic plans and do make all the deci­sions insane­ly fast. But it would­n’t be very effi­cient, it would­n’t be very effec­tive. Because one, we’d have a lot of blind spots in our orga­ni­za­tion and a few 100 employ­ees to the peo­ple doing the work would­n’t have any buy in and would just feel like we’re telling them what to do. Yeah, so there’s so we know to is log­i­cal. The chal­lenge is it some­times starts swelling towards 12, 15, 22. Here where these teams become real­ly big and cumbersome.

Brad Giles 07:02

The prob­lem with a real­ly small lead­er­ship team that take two or three peo­ple, if depend­ing on the size of busi­ness, is that you might not reach out to all of the cor­ners of the office, if that makes sense. Yeah, so let’s say there’s you and sales man­ag­er who meet up and you form your own small lead­er­ship team and you make the deci­sions, while the peo­ple in oper­a­tions or mar­ket­ing or account­ing may not have a hand in that. So you want diver­si­ty in the lead­er­ship team so that you can kind of get some infor­ma­tion, let’s say out­side of the ivory tow­er, or some infor­ma­tion that’s kind of from around the business.

Kevin Lawrence 07:43

Yeah. So yeah, make bet­ter thought­ful deci­sions. Num­ber one, yeah, too. And there’s two things, mak­ing the best deci­sion you can and to get­ting buy in. And there’s two sep­a­rate things that you’re try­ing to achieve with that team. And some­times their bias too much towards just effi­cient or good deci­sion. And some­times their bias too much, but we’re in align­ment and get­ting every­one’s buy in. So we’ll get into that. But I’ll give you an exam­ple. So one com­pa­ny we’ve worked with for quite a while and our lead­er­ship team has grown and shrunk over the years, there’s no because there’s no per­fect answer. But gen­er­al­ly, we’ve got about 11 or 12 peo­ple, and I’m look­ing at our annu­al meet­ings and our quar­ter­ly meet­ings. It’s a very trans­par­ent group. That’s a group down us very high trust. And gen­er­al­ly, for 90% of 95% of the work we do, that team comes togeth­er and does the strate­gic plan­ning, and makes a lot of the big deci­sions. Now some­times you bring extra peo­ple in for align­ment. So I think actu­al­ly, the core team, I think is it’s nine, but often it will be 12 because the CEO likes to invite dif­fer­ent lead­ers in on a rota­tion­al basis, right? The key is that when they invite them in, they say it’s, you’re com­ing for this meet­ing. They don’t expect to always be part of that team. Yep. Once you’ve invit­ed some­one onto that spe­cial deci­sion mak­ing team telling them they can’t come to meet­ing is like kick­ing them off the island and sur­vivor. Yep. And there’s a lot of dra­ma. We actu­al­ly, this has hap­pened a few times, but we lost an exec­u­tive after that. And they weren’t Sor­ry. Yeah. As a direc­tor. This last minute, it’s a mas­sive almost insult to them. So once you invite them on, it’s very hard to get them off.

Brad Giles 09:41

Yeah. And so you want to be sure if you’re invit­ing some­one onto a lead­er­ship team, that’s, that’s for sure.

Kevin Lawrence 09:48

Yeah. And my default is invite them on to come for one or two meet­ings and say it’s a one or two meet­ing thing. So you have an auto­mat­ic exit because it’s super hard to man­age and next thing you know, they’re big because they were there not because they need to be there.

Brad Giles 10:02

If you’re gonna have a lead­er­ship team that you just men­tioned they were 11 or nine as a core swelling to 11. Was that right?

Kevin Lawrence 10:11

11,12 13 Sometimes.

Brad Giles 10:14

Yeah, so nine is, is kind of is large, I’d say 12 or 13. Obvi­ous­ly, if you jump­ing in and out, that’s a slight­ly dif­fer­ent sce­nario. But if you’ve got 10 or 11, peo­ple, you know, you had bet­ter be run­ning, high­ly effec­tive meetings.

Kevin Lawrence 10:37

You’re ques­tion­ing my abil­i­ty to run a meet­ing? No, I’m just walk­ing over the audi­ence. They have a first I know, I know, they have a facil­i­ta­tor, though, like the when you get to that size, you need a facil­i­ta­tor to run the meet­ing. The prob­lem is, it takes one of the exec­u­tives out if they tried to do it. And it takes a fair amount of skill and tech­nique. And so as a facil­i­ta­tor, when I’m run­ning a meet­ing, I’ve done 1000s of them, I can eas­i­ly run a meet­ing with a dozen peo­ple, what we have to do is to just there’s for a lot of real­ly crit­i­cal dis­cus­sions, we got to break up into small­er groups, because it’s hard to have a hearty dis­cus­sion with 12, the three out­spo­ken peo­ple will want to speak. And even the con­ver­sa­tion slows down. There’s too many peo­ple to have pro­duc­tive con­ver­sa­tions. So we often split up and then come back. And it’s fun­ny because the group does­n’t like to split up. It’s like split­ting up the fam­i­ly din­ner. And you know, there’s the kids table in the adults table. Well, it might be okay with kids. But when you try and put the adults in two sep­a­rate rooms, there’s resis­tance. So you got to go against grav­i­ty almost and split peo­ple up to go and do it. But it can work. But it’s if you don’t do it, it’s a very chal­leng­ing meet­ing to run to make it effec­tive. With­out an out­side facilitator.

Brad Giles 11:57

Yeah, you have to be effec­tive. So I have a book com­ing out on the first of Novem­ber, it’s called onboard­ed. And in there, I talk about this prob­lem as the team grows, the com­plex­i­ty increas­es, because if it’s you and I talk­ing Kev, we’ve got two points of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If we add anoth­er per­son into this con­ver­sa­tion, then we’ve got six points of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Okay. So you and me and me and you, for exam­ple. And then so you grow that and you grow that those points of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, once you get to about 10 peo­ple, you just the because those points of com­mu­ni­ca­tion are expo­nen­tial rather than lin­ear, if that makes sense. Like they just kept grow­ing. Yep. Yes. Keep up with it.

Kevin Lawrence 12:46

Each addi­tion­al per­son makes it notably more chal­leng­ing. Yeah. And makes the meet­ing longer, because it takes more time. Yeah. So it’s that. So it you’re dra­mat­i­cal­ly increas­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty of hav­ing an effec­tive the of hav­ing an effec­tive meeting.

Brad Giles 13:04

There’s two of us on this pod­cast. Imag­ine if we had nine peo­ple on this pod­cast? Exact­ly. It’d be real­ly so much bet­ter. No, yeah, it’d be real­ly easy to get effec­tive outcomes.

Kevin Lawrence 13:16

It is. But the dis­tinc­tion is, it’s a com­bi­na­tion of mak­ing the best strate­gic deci­sion, ver­sus mak­ing that and get­ting a lot of align­ment. And for a lot of com­pa­nies we work with get­ting some addi­tion­al align­ment is there’s val­ue in that. So we’ll give up a lit­tle bit of effi­cien­cy to get a lit­tle more engage­ment and align­ment like anoth­er one that we work with. You know, at one point, we had 24 peo­ple on the leadership.

Brad Giles 13:44

Wow. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 13:47

Now, based on the size of the busi­ness, it might have been a lit­tle much for that. So I thought based on the size of the busi­ness and what was going on. It was­n’t I think, for the intent, it was­n’t wrong. But there was anoth­er one I had 30. It was break­out groups. But that’s the only the only way to have a dis­cus­sion, but it was con­stant break­out groups. And when we did that one on Zoom. It was break­out group after break­out group. And it it it worked with a lit­tle bit of strat­e­gy and a lot of exe­cu­tion. But in that group, we end­ed up get­ting the CEOs direct reports, to do sep­a­rate real­ly deep strat­e­gy. And to take a lot of the input from this group and boil it down and get to the final place. But you’ve got to in it takes a lot of like the amount of prep we had to do for those meet­ings. Yeah, to engi­neer it to make it work. So when that case, we’ve got a group of five, that that is the direct reports, basi­cal­ly the CEO, who are the exec­u­tive team that does the deep­er strat­e­gy, and we just had like a two and a two day ses­sion just on that. And then the rest of the team comes up and picks up that strat­e­gy and builds it into exe­cu­tion and has some strate­gic debates. But it’s they’ve at that size, they’ve, they’ve real­ly broke it down to what used to be the strate­gic plan­ning meet­ing to it’s like the exe­cu­tion meet­ing where the strat­e­gy is done out­side it with a small­er team. And they’ve had to basi­cal­ly cre­ate two meet­ing rhythms to be effec­tive with that, and it for them, it works real­ly well. It’s just a lot of engi­neer­ing when you want to involve that many people.

Brad Giles 15:47

Yeah, for sure. So it’s a bit of it can be a slip­pery slope as well. So imag­ine if you start off with a lead­er­ship team of six peo­ple, and then you grow and you’re suc­cess­ful. And then you need to bring on a new role that you did­n’t have before, or they absolute­ly get an invite to the team. Okay, so then let’s go six months or a year down the track, and you bring on a new per­son, senior per­son as well, they got to get an invite to time. And so sud­den­ly, you can blink your eyes, and you’ve got 10 peo­ple, and the meet­ings are slight­ly dys­func­tion­al. So you’ve got a, as I said, it’s a slip­pery slope, and you’ve got it.

Kevin Lawrence 16:23

So that’s how this com­pa­ny used to have eight. Yeah, a decade ago, there was eight. But as they’ve grown those addi­tion­al will, you know, the oth­er VP is there. Well, the oth­er direc­tor is there. And all of a sud­den, it’s like, you get too many. Yeah. And so. So there’s, there’s lots of exam­ples. And we’ve got lots of com­pa­nies that, you know, like, if you said, we’re going to do some strate­gic plan­ning with a with a, with a lead­er­ship team, and there are six peo­ple, it’s a walk in the park. Yeah, as a facil­i­ta­tor, it’s notably eas­i­er, it’s faster, because there’s less points of data to align and make deci­sions with. And again, when you get up to the 12, which is very com­mon for our medi­um sized clients, it’s just hard­er. And it’s hard­er, hard­er to pull off effectiveness.

Brad Giles 17:12

It’s hard­er to get the results that you need. There’s a team that I work with in Syd­ney. And that slip­pery slope is what has hap­pened there. It’s they start­ed off with one and they brought in a new and it’s just sud­den­ly it’s gone. Now I think they’ve got 11. And you kind of said it’s, it gets hard­er, but what you see intu­itive­ly hap­pen­ing is there is a core with­in that group that’s emerg­ing. And it’s like, what we’re bring­ing the oth­er peo­ple on, because we feel oblig­at­ed to because of their either senior­i­ty, or they’re already on the team, or some­thing like that. So yeah, it’s I tend to agree with you back there, I tend to think that if there’s a sweet spot, it’s prob­a­bly six to eight peo­ple. So that’s ideal.

Kevin Lawrence 17:59

There is a place for 14 to 16 there is you’re just going to have to engi­neer the meet­ing a lot more, do more pre work, you’re just, you’re just you’re cre­at­ing a lot.

Brad Giles 18:11

There’s a place for it.

Kevin Lawrence 18:13

But I’ve got a client in India, we have like, the last one we had, we had it in Bom­bay, and there was 16.

Brad Giles 18:23

When you go to break­out rooms, or break­out tables, depend­ing if it’s in per­son or not, you’re gonna prob­a­bly go into groups of five to eight peo­ple in each of those breakouts.

Kevin Lawrence 18:37

Like five, five or six? Yes, yeah. Engi­neer the meet­ing dif­fer­ent­ly. And again, in that one where there was 18? Yeah, the the three broth­ers that run the busi­ness. They’re awe­some. That I worked with her. We had, we have a street strat­e­gy meet­ing before­hand to map out the high lev­el and get things clear. And then we bring it to the team to get to get the strat­e­gy fin­ished. And align­ment, we’ve pre pre­pared because oth­er­wise it would be too challenging.

Brad Giles 19:04

Yeah. The point is that humans work effec­tive­ly in that space. So yeah, you can have a lot.

Kevin Lawrence 19:11

I get your point, though, I get your point. In those envi­ron­ments, you break them down into group of six, which is an easy team for hearty dis­cus­sion and debate. Yes. And so if you’re going to have more than let’s call it the six, you’re like­ly going to have to break into groups. So you get back to the six. Yeah, like in my oth­er clients and us. That’s a great point, Brad, is that if you do more than six, you’d love to break down into groups that are, you know, around six if you’re going to have par­ty discussions.

Brad Giles 19:37

So don’t expect to have 12 peo­ple in a room and be high­ly effec­tive unless you’re using some­thing like break­out rooms. Yep. You’re going to have to man­age and under­stand that it’s not impos­si­ble, but it could be too big to get them all in a room and expect them to work through an agen­da in a high­ly effec­tive man­ner. So Jeff Bezos, you know, he He’s got a rel­a­tive degree of suc­cess. And he said that every­body in the firm need­ed to assem­ble around what he called the two piz­za rule. So that meant is that if a team was work­ing late, and they could­n’t be fed off to piz­za pies, then he said, It’s too big.

Kevin Lawrence 20:23

So depend­ing on your appetite, that’s a max­i­mum of prob­a­bly six ish people.

Brad Giles 20:28

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And, and so there’s some math’s behind that. Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 20:34

So the sum­ma­ry I would give for today. It’s basi­cal­ly, you know, healthy dis­cus­sions hap­pen in groups of about, let’s say, six, right, on aver­age, five, sev­en, Max. And if you’re going to have more than that, you just have to engi­neer it, and you’re mak­ing it hard­er for your­self to man­age to run that meet­ing? Well, if you use a facil­i­ta­tor, it makes it hard­er for the per­son that you’re pay­ing to do it. So maybe it’s not so bad. But you’re going to have to like­ly break up into those small­er groups to have effec­tive dis­cus­sions and then come back to the main group is, is kind of the thing here. So is your lead­er­ship team too big or too small? Well, we don’t know if that’s up to you. But if it’s larg­er than six or sev­en, you’re like­ly going to have a hard time hav­ing the dis­cus­sions you need to and you’re going to have to break up into small­er groups, whether it’s with­in the meet­ing, or a sep­a­rate, small­er, super strate­gic group out­side of the meeting.

Brad Giles 21:27

Yeah, yeah, Indeed. Indeed. So a cou­ple of pod­casts that are relat­ed to this one, you may be inter­est­ed in Episode 92, the month­ly lead­er­ship team meet­ing, Episode 77, the curse of being on a great lead­er­ship team that’s a crack­er that on an episode 24 How to get lead­er­ship teams to think strate­gi­cal­ly. So is your lead­er­ship team too big? Well, that’s kind of on you, I sup­pose. But there is cer­tain­ly some human dynam­ics that you can’t ignore, that may mean that you need to change things around. So Kim, good chat today. I hope that yeah, I hope that you’ve enjoyed our chat about is your lead­er­ship team too big. So my name is Brad Giles, and you can find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com Through you, Kevin. You can find it Lawrence and co​.com. And we both pro­duce week­ly newslet­ters that you may find inter­est­ing. Of course, you can find this episode as well on YouTube. If you search the growth Whis­per­er is of course sub­scribe to that as well if you see fit. Hope that you have your­self a great week and you’ve enjoyed our chat about is your lead­er­ship team to be look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week. See you later.

Kevin Lawrence 22:43

Have a great one. See you