The Manager - Edition 3 - Dunbar's Law and the role of management - Cultivated Management
The Manager - Edition 3
THE
manager.
Edition 3
Dunbar's Number - The Rule of 150
Hi and welcome to this week's Cultivated Management newsletter.
This week we're digging in to Dunbar's Number (Or the rule of 150) which suggests that when a company grows to 150+ it starts to suffer from challenges created by our natural human limitations to keep socially connected to that many people.
The effects in business can be devastating and hard to correct - but only if you try to force compliance and process. And that's not what Cultivated Managers do :)
To solve the effects of Dunbar's Number you need to give people a reason to connect - to feel emotionally connected back to the business. And this is done through management.
As a company scales and grows it becomes increasingly tricky to maintain good communication and connections between people and teams. The more people there are, the more connections exist. Dunbar's Number (150) is a suggestion that there is an upper limit to the number of connections human's can make before communication and relationships break down.
I've seen this first hand as people join the business and have no natural or systematic connection to the main history, the story the company tells about itself or the cultural torch bearers of the business. People (and teams) then make up their own culture, stories and values - and why not - there is nothing coming from the rest of the business.
At the heart of this problem is a lack of good communication and consistent management.
It's because of rapid growth, and the lack of good managers that live and breathe the values of the business, that this problem exists. In many companies the induction process is the heart of the new starter journey and they place a huge emphasis on ensuring they hire and retain people who fit the values well. The problem is many companies have a hard time even defining what their values are, let alone hiring people that live them.
Hence, when people join, the induction process either feeds them false values that don't match the reality or the induction process is skipped entirely. It's not just about induction, it's about the flow of communication through a business too and the chasms that can grow between the main core of the business (Founders, Executives, Long term employees).
When Dunbar's Number is in play in a business you see tribes form, growth slows and fighting increases.
The Symptoms
Some classic signs you have elements of Dunbar's Number in play:
New people join and you have no idea who they are or what they do - sometimes they will have worked at the business for months or years. In fact, sometimes entire teams pop up and you've no idea what they do. This is especially prevalent in large organisations or rapid growth global companies.
Teams fight with each other and individual spats become much more visible and intense. There can be lots of bitching and snide comments and some teams don't even talk to each other.
Duplicate work happens with surprising regularity. People are trying to solve the same problems and even though intentions can be positive, the results can be time wasted, more fighting between teams and an inconsistent approach to solving systemic issues.
Many people in the business spend a lot of time cleaning up other people's messes. Failure Demand is high and sometimes entire teams are created to solve problems created earlier in the flow of work.
Many people in the business spend more time trying to fix internal problems than they do adding value to the customers. It can take weeks to do something that should be no more than an hours work. Patching and tactical fixes are the main approach leaders go for, but it doesn't solve the problem. Why would it? These are systemic problems and require bigger thinking.
The role of individuals grows, often not accompanied by more pay. People start to resent the extra work. They cling to their job titles and protect their work at all costs. Fiefdoms emerge and co-operation becomes a negative word.
The results from Engagement Surveys start to show a negative decline across typical areas of engagement. One exception is any question related to teamwork or friends at work - these show a steadying out or a rise. This is because people like those they work with (their tribe). These tribes are sometimes the only reason people remain at the place of work.
The business becomes very top heavy as executives start to believe that more process is the solution and more leadership is needed. You often find lots of layers of management, individual contributors who also manage (and do neither as well as they want to) and decision making being made only by executives and senior management.
It becomes really hard to bring new people in to the business. The learning curve for new joiners gets bigger as there is less visibility of how work flows due to fiefdoms and lack of communication.
It becomes slower to onboard new customers and the flow of work doesn't flow so well. Work requires more tearing down and building up (to pass from department to department) and more metrics are gathered at an individual level (to work out who is at fault) for nothing more than fuelling the in-fighting. Very few companies measure the work from a customer's perspective so everyone does what is needed to meet their targets - the only group of people who suffer because of this are customers.
Innovation is stifled as new ideas don't flow, collaboration isn't natural and people keep themselves to themselves. Innovation thrives when people move around and share ideas - but little of this happens as their are few incentives to do so.
It's common to find decisions being made based on myths, rumours and hearsay about departments rather than fully qualified, measures or studied. Why would we go and study and get knowledge when we can rely on someone else's opinion of what happens.
Processes no longer serve the business or the customer, but fixing them becomes harder as they are, by nature, cross functional and require co-operation - the very thing that is missing due to many of the reasons above.
Why does it happen?
It's mostly because we tend to split in to smaller groups and get our information, values and behaviours from those close to us. In the absense of a consistent company culture, good communication that flows through good managers and clear communication from leaders, people focus on their immediate groups.
Tribes form.
If you're lucky you are in a tribe where the members and managers are still positively tied back to the main business. They may be early members of the business, cultural ambassadors or original founders. They may be long term employees who have seeded new teams and bring with them the very values and cultural norms of the main business.
If you're not so lucky then you may end up in a tribe where the members and managers are not positively connected back to the whole. Not that they are doing things to be negative, far from it. They are forming their own culture, values and ways of working as nothing is forthcoming from the executive or management tiers.
These loosely connected tribes start to defend their work, make up their own rules, only talk to those close (in location and job type) and start to build their own communication patterns and channels. This doesn't just happen with remote offices but also within the head office itself.
The result is that people are not tied emotionally or behaviourally to the main mission and core values. The company starts to have eco-systems of different groups.
Sometimes these differences can be poles apart, especially when it comes to management. For example, one team may have a command and control manager, whereas another team may have a manager that hires good people and leaves them alone. work with them get the freedom they need to do good work. .
The solution to Dunbar's Number is to develop the management tier
At the heart of solving Dunbar's Number is the need to reconnect all of the various tribes back to a single, clear and consistent set of values that are lived and breathed by management and executives.
You cannot reconnect people back to the core through process and compliance, which is often what people try to force. It needs to be emotional.
The managers and execs must reconnect and lead by example. They must embrace the culture and ethos of the business and be torch bearers for it. They must connect with other managers and share a management responsibility to improving the system and the flow of work.
Managers must become conduits of communication from the executives and feed back information, results and ideas from those in their teams. Even better, they should open up pathways of communication through all tiers.
If people become professional managers rather than individual contributers who also manage then you need fewer managers and it becomes easier to identify and train the managers.
If their approach to management was consistent you would have fewer disagreements about what is right or wrong or why some teams have more freedom than other.
If managers started to improve the flow of customer work through the system they would remove many of the barrier, improve processes and allow people to get more done. People could then focus on delivering value to customers, not banging their heads against internal friction.
Failure Demand would reduce, more accountability would be placed on managers and managers could all come together to solve genuine business problems. There would be less need to protect work and more clear direction on who is responsible for what.
In a nutshell management is the key to solving the very departmental and tribal splits that happen when their is no natural connection to the core. Managers become the connection to the core, and when it happens - it's a powerful thing.
Managers should feel connected to the core and be able to tell stories to new starters about how the company got to where they did and what is next.
Managers should act like founders of the business. And wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?
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