Scaling Teams

So, you need more people to achieve your objectives.

Are You Sure?

First, are you sure?

Top-Down

• The order matters: hire top-down whenever possible.
• If you post positions and hire bottom up, you will run into challenges with either cascading "promotions", or possible retention issues.
• Your managers and team leaders should take on some responsibility for growing their teams.

Growing and Scaling

• Similarities and differences.

Team Growth Approaches.

There are three main approaches to scaling teams.

1. Creating New Teams

Growth can be achieved by adding entirely new teams. These new teams will be on their own. They will not absorb or learn the existing culture; they will create their own team culture.

2. Splitting Teams and Growing

By splitting teams first, before adding new team members, you disperse knowledge and culture. However, by splitting first, you also have not learned how new team members fit into the existing teams. This can result in miss-matched skills and capabilities across or between teams.

3. Growing and then Splitting Teams

This is an approach that has some of the fewest disadvantages, although there are still some. You need to have strong front-line leaders that are capable of managing large teams, until they can be split up. There's also a risk that the culture gets "diluted" with the large team, before the new team members can learn the culture. However, the advantages might outweigh these concerns, as this approach allows groups to develop naturally around team members skills and abilities, and the needs of the team.

Steps

• What is your team (or teams) currently doing?
• What are they not doing?
• SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)?