Should you be leading teams differently as your team grows?
Your business started as a very small enterprise. It perhaps began with you and maybe a handful of other people. You did extremely well, money started coming through and you made the choice to expand your team. As your business continues to grow, you keep adding more and more people to your roster of talented individuals.
Now, you’re in a position where you have a team of dozens of people. In the beginning, you were only leading a team of, say, five individuals. This throws up a massive talking point amongst leaders - should your approach to leadership change as your team grows?
The short answer is a resounding yes! You need to alter your style of leadership because bigger teams are different to manage than smaller ones. If you keep on reading, we’ll explain things in more detail.
Small teams require direct management
When you have a small team, you can take on a direct management role. This means you are far more active in directly speaking to every member of the team. In fact, when you started your company, you probably developed really personal relationships with each team member. You know more about them as individuals, rather than just knowing them as work colleagues.
Unfortunately, this style of leadership isn’t possible when your team gets bigger. The more people that come, the less time you can spend getting to know them all individually. Instead, you take on more of an indirect management role. You promote members of your team as managers to take on the direct role for you. In turn, they report back to you - but you basically allow them to lead the teams directly while you work from afar.
Changes in workplace culture
Another key difference between small and big teams is the workplace culture. Again, when the team is little, everyone knows one another personally - including you. As such, there’s a stronger relationship and more trust between you and your team. When your team gets to the point where you can’t be as directly involved, there’s a culture shift.
Instead of seeing you as an ally, your team sees you as the big scary manager. They become intimated by you because you’re the one in charge. Consequently, it can be harder to get honest feedback from people as they don’t want to disagree with you. Needless to say, this can lead to so many incorrect business decisions because you think everyone agrees!
Thus, you need to change your leadership style to encourage more inclusivity and differences of opinion. Set up channels for people to leave feedback - and make it anonymous if they’d prefer. This way, you learn more about your team and their response to your ideas. If you carry on leading as you did with a small team, you’re unlikely to get the same feedback and it can mean you work within an echo chamber. Everything you say just gets nods and thumbs up because people are too afraid to speak out.
In conclusion, you should definitely be leading teams differently as your team grows. Take on a more indirect approach, relying on others to be more directly involved in leading your teams. Likewise, put systems in place to encourage honest feedback, so everyone feels as though they have a voice and you aren’t some big scary boss!
