👥 How Many People Make a Great Team?

We live in a world that celebrates scale. More people. More ideas. More collaboration. But when it comes to teams, more isn't always better. In fact, it often leads to less ownership, less airtime, and less clarity.

This week I want to unpack one of the most counterintuitive insights I’ve explored in my book-writing process: the most effective teams aren’t the bigger ones. They’re the best designed.

Let’s talk about why.

Week #5 Focus: Effective Team Design

Key definitions for this week:

• Communication Complexity: the number of unique lines of communication between team members. It grows exponentially as the team grows.

  
  

• Coordination Tax: the time and energy cost of keeping everyone aligned. This grows non-linearly, especially when decision rights are unclear.

  
  

• Collaboration Overload: occurs when the volume and complexity of team interactions exceed an individual’s capacity to process, contribute meaningfully, and maintain focus, causing stress, inefficiency, and burnout.

Why I am studying these concepts for my book:

My book is about how leaders build environments where challenge and safety go hand in hand.

And here’s the thing: psychological safety dies in chaos.​When teams are too big, too messy, or too unstructured, people stop speaking up not because they don’t care, but because:

• they’re not sure whose role it is,

• they fear interrupting,

• or they’re simply overwhelmed.

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Designing for smallness, clarity, and cadence is an act of care for people and performance.

Example:

Imagine a team of 5. Each person only needs to stay in sync with 4 others - that’s 10 communication lines total.

Now imagine a team of 12. There are 66 potential lines of communication. That’s 6x the complexity for less than 3x the people.

And no, Slack doesn’t fix that. Neither does “open communication culture.” What works? Clear roles. Smaller pods. Intentional design.

Research Evidence:

• Fred Brooks, a computer scientist and software engineering pioneer, introduced Brooks’ Law in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month(1975). He observed that adding more people to a late project actually delays it further.

• Rob Cross et al. (2016) in his article Collaborative Overload for HBR shared findings that top performers often spend 50–85% of their time in meetings, emails, and other collaborative activities. This distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 3% to 5% of employees account for 20% to 35% of the value-added collaborations.

• LePine et al. (2008) conducted a meta-analysis examining teamwork processes and their impact on team effectiveness. It found that team size moderates the impact of teamwork processes on performance: smaller teams benefit more from effective coordination and communication.

Practice It with Me: Team Micro-Redesign Exercise

Let’s bring this to your team:

Step 1: Calculate your team’s communication lines using the Brooks' formula

Reflect: Is this level of complexity manageable or overwhelming?

Step 2: Ask these three design questions

1. Where are we losing airtime or clarity?

2. What can we break down into smaller task forces?

3. Do we need a clearer decision-making structure (e.g., who decides, who advises, who executes)?

   
   

Step 3: Try this experiment

• Choose one upcoming discussion.

• Split your team into smaller “thinking pairs” or trios.

• Use structured rounds: silent brainstorm first, then give everyone 60 sec of equal airtime to share, before bringing ideas to the full group.

• Watch how much more inclusive, thoughtful, and energetic the discussion becomes.

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That’s it for this Sunday’s insight. Today, we explored why team size matters more than we think and how too many communication lines can quietly kill performance, even in talented groups.

📩 I’d love to hear from you: what’s been your experience with team size?​

Have you found smaller teams easier to manage? Or have you discovered creative ways to make larger teams work?