Have You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling?

“This place just isn’t the same as it was when we started.”

Marilyn had quietly started looking for a new job. As she sat across the lunch table from Mary, her best friend at work, she shared the frustration that drove her to think about leaving.

“When I first started here everyone was excited about what we were doing. All the employees and our families would get together for a company picnic in the summer. We would have a hilarious white elephant gift exchange every Christmas. It really felt like a family.”

Marilyn wasn’t the only one struggling with the changes brought by growth. James, the company’s owner, had many of the same thoughts about how the business felt now. Though he wasn’t looking to leave his own company, he did wonder what could be done to bring back that close-knit, cohesive group vibe that made coming to work so enjoyable.

No one wants to be miserable at work, but worrying about relationships in your business may be the last thing on your mind. You have more important things to do than sit on the floor holding hands with your team members singing Kumbaya. Right?

Maybe.

But the hard data has shown again and again that positive relationships at work increase quality, productivity, client satisfaction, and the bottom line. *

Business owners trying to escape what we at Barcanic Consulting call "the founder's funnel" ** often struggle to keep the same level of unity, trust, and fun in their business while they grow. In our work with these owners we've discovered there are two primary requirements to helping team members maintain these types of relationships when scaling up.

The Bad Part of Bigger

The first requirement is to understand how group size impacts the development of close-knit relationships.

Most new businesses start as small groups. In the beginning, the owner may only have two or three others on their team. From a social interaction perspective, we might consider this size business to be like a single-celled organism. Everyone exists in one group.

In a single cell business, it’s fairly easy for people to get to know each other. After all, you’re likely all working in close quarters. Anyone in the business can typically give their opinion on anything that happens in the business. Trust is high because you see the others in action every day.

As the business grows, it predictably leaves behind its single-celled structure. Once there are more than 12-15 people, the business naturally develops multiple cells. Now there is likely a small leadership team that makes most of the decisions. Communication takes more effort and it’s more difficult to keep everyone in the loop. The likelihood that any one person in the organization will know everything that’s happening begins to fade over time.

If growth continues, the cells continue to multiply. Instead of “one big happy family,” the business is now made up of departments, functions, and divisions. Without a good deal of hard work, those necessary divisions almost inevitably turn into silos.

In the early days, everybody knew your name and you knew everyone else’s. But now most people walking the halls don't know anything about one another. As a result, trust is more difficult across the divisions. Negative attribution bias makes it easier to assume the worst about others and assign ulterior motives.

This realization is often accompanied by a natural sense of loss for those who were with the business in the early days. Many of them no longer have the type of access to decision makers. Where once you could knock on the wall of the owner’s cubicle and ask a question or share an opinion, now you can barely get an appointment with them or a member of the executive team. It can easily feel like there are “insiders” and “outsiders” and those who were once insiders may find themselves feeling like they’re on the outside.

The Math Behind the Feelings

The problem isn’t that anyone is being intentionally excluded. It’s a simple matter of math and science. You may remember from your sociology class that as group size increases, the number of social connections multiplies exponentially.

For instance, a group of three coworkers creates three relationships between them.

But add just one more person to the group the number of relationships doubles, jumping to six.

If a business grows from 12 team members to 35 people in five departments, the number of relationships jumps from 66 to an astounding 276, more than four times as many! ***

It’s possible to keep the close-knit feeling you once had, but team members must recognize the changes necessary to do it. Those tight relationships will no longer come from the business as a whole. Instead, they will be found in its smaller constituent units.

The Good Part of Smaller

Leaders have to understand the ingredients that combined to make the business close-knit to begin with. This is the second requirement for maintaining cohesive teams as you grow. It's vital to the health of the business that leaders at every level are skilled and comfortable creating cohesive teams. Gaining skill in the following four areas will help ensure every team has a high level of trust, commitment, and positivity.

·         Shared objectives encourage a sense of unity as we all pull in the same direction.

·         Transparent communication provides a context for trust and a willingness to put the needs of the group before our own.

·         Intentional collaboration invites input from every team member. It embraces the healthy conflict that can arise from differences of opinion and works through it so all sides feel heard and understood. This type of collaboration promotes a sense of ownership and pride in the group.

·         Personal interest ensures that team members get to know each other and feel safe and supported in the team.

Maintaining that close-knit feeling as an organization grows doesn't happen naturally. It takes hard work and care. But the results, both personal and business, are well worth it. You’ll get better performance from people who stay with you longer and everyone will enjoy the journey a whole lot more.

* Explore the impact of employee engagement and well-being on your business.

** The founder's funnel is what owners experience when everything important has to go through them and the business can never outgrow their own personal capacity.

** If you’re interested in the math behind this concept, the formula is

 where r is the total number of relationships and n is the total number of people.