Читать книгу Hardwired Humans - Andrew O'Keeffe - Страница 8

This instinct helps explain why:

 people talk about a great team being just like a family

 teams have a natural size

 80% of people who resign do so because of their manager

 conflict in our team drives us crazy

 silo behaviour emerges as organisations grow beyond a moderate size.

JANE GOODALL WATCHED FLINT die. Dr Goodall first began studying the chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960. One of her early observations was that chimps, like us, have strong bonds between family members and those bonds endure for life. Flint’s reaction to his mother’s death shows how strong this bond can be. His mother Flo died when Flint was eight and a half years old. So traumatised was the youngster with the loss of his mother he died within three weeks.

Some 35 years after Flint’s death Dr Goodall was telling me about Flo and Flint’s deaths. In October 2008 Dr Goodall and I had just concluded a three week tour speaking to business audiences about the implications of instincts for leaders. In vividly recalling Flint’s death, Dr Goodall said that she could describe it as nothing other than grief. upon Flo’s death Flint stopped eating and with his immunisation system so weakened he quickly deteriorated. Back closer to the time she wrote, ‘The last short journey he made, pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo’s body had lain. There he stayed for several hours … he struggled on a little further, then curled up—and never moved again.’

The first of our nine instincts is social belonging. We are a social animal; we are not loners. As a social animal, we gain our sense of identify from our membership of two groups: our family group that naturally numbers about seven people, and our extended clan which can number up to around 150.

Let’s make concrete the connection between instincts and organisational life. The building block of human communities is family groups. Given that we have just recently emerged into offices and factories, it follows that the building blocks of organisations are, or should be, small family-sized teams. With our need to connect intimately with a small group of others numbering around seven, it also means that nothing drives us to distraction faster than if our immediate work team is dysfunctional. It means that as organisations grow towards 150, people will begin to say, ‘It’s not as friendly as it used to be.’ And when numbers go significantly beyond 150 we will have stronger bonds to our department or subsidiary than to the whole organisation to the extent that silos and internal competition will tend to occur as departments compete for resources and recognition.

Family

Our strong sense of community and lifetime family bonds comes from our reproductive strategy as a species. There are not many animals on the planet that have this lifetime family bond as their survival strategy.

Our strategy is to invest everything in the raising of a few offspring—we focus our reproductive energy on just a few children. Some animals adopt a strategy at the other extreme. A mother turtle, for example, swims up to the beach during the night, digs a shallow hole and lays her eggs. She covers her eggs with sand, and that’s her mothering duty done! The hatchlings have all the information they need to survive and the species plays the numbers game where enough hatchlings—around one in a thousand—hopefully survive through to adulthood to reproduce.

We humans don’t play the numbers game. Human parents, particularly mothers, invest heavily in raising an infant to reproductive age. After birth, a human baby’s brain takes another year to complete its physical growth and quite a few years before the youngster could hope to survive on their own. The human mother has the capacity to give birth to only a handful of children over her lifespan. With this incredible investment in an offspring, it’s not surprising that the bond between parents and offspring, and between direct family members, are for life.

There is something special about families and our primary sense of identify that comes with being part of a family. In April 1846, the Donner party consisting of 87 men, women and children set off from Illinois en route inland to California on the west coast of the uSA. unfortunately for the group they reached the Sierra Nevada mountains later than expected and became trapped by an October snow storm and camped to face the winter. Come spring, 40 of the party had died due to the atrocious conditions. But curiously, a high proportion of people who survived were members of family units and a high proportion who died were young men travelling alone. Only three of the 15 single men survived and the only woman who died was travelling in a small group of four.

We’re just not loners and family holds a special place. James Bain spent 35 years in a Florida gaol wrongly sentenced for a crime he didn’t commit. When he was freed in December 2009 he was asked on the steps of the court house how he got through so many years in prison. He answered with his engaging smile, ‘By maintaining myself and to get home to my mum.’ When asked what he planned to do now he was out, he said, ‘I’m going home with my family. I’m going to see my mum. That’s the most important thing in my life right now.’

We are not surprised by this human response. It is a key part of what it means to be human and an instinct we share with chimpanzees.

Taronga chimpanzees

Through my work using zoos as a base, I have become friendly with a number of wonderful primate keepers. Louise Grossfeldt is head of primates at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and her colleague, Allan Schmidt, is a senior member of her team. They generously share their stories of their chimp community to assist leaders gain insight into the natural condition for social animals.

The chimpanzee community at Taronga is one of the best zoo-based communities in the world, mainly due to the size and complexity of the group that reflects the wild condition of chimps. There are 19 individuals in the chimp community at Taronga. The 19 chimps represent six families. There are three adult males, and the multi-male, multi-family nature of chimpanzee communities is a key part of the social complexity, coalitions and politics in the life of a chimp.

In November 2009 the chimps at Taronga were temporarily relocated while their exhibit underwent a major refurbishment. The relocation was as sensitive as an office move, planned with as much thought as we would expect our office move to be managed. Louise and her team planned the move around family groups. The politics amongst the male chimps also featured prominently in the keepers’ planning. Adult males are almost always rivals for the top job, and the relationships between males is observably more intense and more dynamic than between the females.

The first group moved the 200 metres to the temporary exhibit was the alpha male, Lubutu, and his family along with the two oldest females. Lubutu was comfortably established in his new territory when on the third day the second of the adult males arrived.

Chimbuka, this second male, was still unconscious and in the care of the vets when Lubutu spotted him. All hell broke loose. Lubutu went into a wild display, hair hackled so he looked twice his size, screaming and banging on walls and screens. A fully-grown adult chimp with around five times the strength of a human male creates an awesome display. Arrivals of females over the previous two days had not created such a response from Lubutu.

After his health check Chimbuka was left to wake up in the den. When he did wake Chimbuka freaked out. In the wild, male chimps never leave their territory so being moved to a strange location would indeed be instinctively frightening. The keepers opened an access raceway so the females might greet and comfort him.

But the females were reluctant to go to him, presumably frightened by Chimbuka’s frenzied display and presumably torn by the decision confronting them—on the one hand, if they left him alone his mood might deteriorate and he might become more dangerous, yet if they went to him they might be attacked. The group of seven females plus juveniles and infants wavered at the edge of the raceway some ten metres away. They oscillated, teetering on going forward and then shrinking back. Individual chimps, not moving themselves, encourage others to go forward. No one moved. The group was frozen.

From the back of the pack comes Bessie, Chimbuka’s 60-year-old grandmother. She wants to get to her grandson. Bessie is frail, stooped and moves awkwardly. She is blocked by the band of petrified observers. Like Moses, she parts a path and makes her way through the group. Finally, she gets to the front of the pack. She crosses the precipice and reaches her grandson. She pauses just before him as if saying, ‘Come here, Sweetie’ and gives him a big hug. The reassuring effect is instant—Chimbuka quickly calms down. The other females now gather round and reassure him. There are some things only a mother or grandmother can provide.

Family as the organisation building block

Given that we humans moved from villages into offices and factories only 250 years ago (and for many countries outside the Western world, many years fewer than that) we bring the basic construct with us to work—our need to bond intimately with a few people. These people become our ‘as if ‘ family and we want that group to be close-knit and functional. Many of us even describe our teams as being ‘just like family’.

Given the critical role of family for the human condition, it is not surprising that our organisations are, or at least should be, built upon family-sized work groups of around seven people. This was the natural size of family in primitive days—mum and dad, perhaps a grandparent and a few children. The range in this group is five to nine, or seven plus or minus the standard deviation of two.

‘Seven’ is significant for the human brain. The working memory of the brain has, on average, the capacity to handle seven items. After seven, plus or minus two, we tend to make mistakes. Seven digits of a telephone number are quite easy to remember, while eight is challenging for the average human. up to seven is the number of people that work in a syndicate team at a conference—eight is quite dysfunctional due to the increased mathematical combinations. In a study by physicist Peter Kline of Medical university of Vienna analysing the size of a committee that is the most dysfunctional, the number that stood out as the worst was the committee size of eight.

Seven or so people as a group is the size that can best create a sense of intimacy. The Economist magazine asked Facebook to test whether the technology of social networking revealed any trend of people’s intimate contacts. In the research conducted by Dr Cameron Marlow, the ‘in-house sociologist’ at Facebook, The Economist reported:

… What also struck Dr Marlow … was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he or she frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more ‘active’ or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or ‘wall’. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six …

The analysis concluded that despite the capacity of online social networking sites, humans ‘still have the same small circles of intimates as ever’.

The family paradox

There’s a paradox in this instinct for leaders and team members. On the one hand we have this instinctive need to bond closest with around seven people.

We want our work team to be as if it is family. We know that nothing drives us to distraction faster than if our team is dysfunctional. And in turn, if it is dysfunctional we hold our leader most responsible. This is our natural model.

Yet on the other hand, and here’s the paradox, our work team cannot be our family. Our true family is our immediate family with whom we have our closest genetic bond. Nothing replaces kin, and it is our real family alone that, in the normal condition, endures a lifetime. Our work team cannot fill that role. So when people refer to their team as ‘family’, it’s important not to take that literally. A team leader needs to manage this paradox. People want to work in a functional team where they are secure in their relationships with each other and confident in the support the leader gives them. But there is a line the team leader can’t cross. For example, the team leader shouldn’t talk to people at work with the same candour that they would use with their immediate family. If the leader did, there is a good chance the staff would be aggrieved and resentful—and the leader might be counselled.

Here is an example of the family paradox. Say you are a team leader and you have someone in your team with powerful body odour. Other team members constantly complain to you about the obnoxious smell of their colleague.

If the situation involved direct family members the matter wouldn’t be a problem and would be solved without great thought or sensitivity. A parent or sibling says to the smelly individual, ‘Johnny, you stink. Go take a shower.’ Johnny is unlikely to be seriously offended and the parent/offspring/sibling relationship is at no risk of being damaged. While we want to experience a strong connection with our work team as if we are family, our social boundaries forbid us to talk as directly as this at work, at least without risking offence. The manager in this particular situation must find a more careful and sensitive approach. The stakes are high in the conversation when it occurs.

When I mentioned this scenario to a group of leaders, one of them confessed that this exact situation confronted him some years before and that the way be managed it was not one of his better moments. unable to find a way to pluck up the courage to raise it with the employee, he left a note on the person’s car windscreen that would be seen after work. The individual never appeared back in the office, no doubt embarrassed by the complaint and probably angry with the manager. Few managers would handle this challenge well. That’s how delicate it can be when we are managing non-family.

Awareness of the implications of this paradox assists leaders to be grounded in the reality of what’s possible and what’s not, and as a consequence, to overcome one of the inhibitors to effective leadership.

Dynamics of a newcomer

Managers and zoo keepers have a lot in common. A newcomer to a small group affects the team’s dynamics. We’ve all noticed team members sizing up a newcomer and the new person working out where they fit in. After all, it’s as if someone has joined our family. Even the power of the boss can be affected, for better or worse, by a new arrival. With social animals, like chimps, gorillas and humans, things can get pretty tricky when introducing a new member into the group.

In April 2010 the keepers at Melbourne Zoo began managing the introduction of a gorilla to the zoo’s gorilla community. Damian Lewis is a primate keeper at the zoo and one of the generous keepers who share their experiences with our clients. Several months after the introduction he was sharing the story with a group of leaders—who could readily identify with the dynamics in the family group associated with a new ‘team’ member.

At the time of the introduction the group comprised a silverback male and four females. A fifth female, Mbeli, was transferred from Taronga Zoo. One of the reasons for the transfer was the ‘team’ dynamics of the group. The silverback, Rigo, was not a very dominant leader—not as dominant as you would expect in the normal course of things for gorillas. As a consequence of this lack of power by the silverback, the most dominant female, Yuska, pretty much ran the show. She henpecks Rigo and dominates the females—who support her against Rigo. His lack of leadership confidence reflects his upbringing. He grew up alone, which for social animals like gorillas has left him lacking social skills and not well adjusted to living in a group, let alone being the dominant and mating male. While he got the job of silverback because of his technical capability (his genes), he has shortcomings in terms of interpersonal and leadership skills. Young Mbeli, aged seven at the time, was a socially confident individual and the plan was that she would make a positive impact on the dynamic of the group. What unfolded was startling, yet not so different to a workplace team.

Now, the keepers don’t just throw the individuals together. It’s very carefully planned. For the first month the interaction was limited to visual contact through a glass window so they could see each other but not touch and then with a mesh between them so they could just touch. Then the physical contact started first with the youngest member of the group, 10-year-old Johari, then Rigo and then two of the three adult females. Only the dominant female, Yuska, remained.

At this point Mbeli had been present for over two months. Throughout that time Yuska was aggressively demonstrating, screaming and banging on the mesh. A gorilla with any social awareness would know that Yuska was threatening and trying to put Mbeli in her place. Well, when the keepers opened the mesh to finally allow them to meet, Mbeli took the initiative. She charged Yuska and punched her in the face! Yuska retreated. For good measure, Mbeli took a bite out of Yuska’s shoulder. It was a cat fight.

After three months of separate introductions the group was finally allowed to be together. Yuska chose an interesting strategy to retain her dominant position. At the time of the group first being together, Yuska was in oestrous—the sexually receptive stage of her cycle. For the three years since Rigo had joined the group as the silverback, Yuska had shown no sexual interest in him and for that whole time had refused to mate with him. Suddenly, with the introduction of Mbeli, she changed her strategy and presented herself for mating. She has continued to regularly mate with Rigo even when she is not in oestrous.

Even within a month of Mbeli’s arrival the keepers observed a positive impact on the culture of the group. Rigo’s position was enhanced and Yuska’s much reduced. The females were less inclined to support Yuska so she was no longer able to run the show. It seemed to be a more stable, harmonious group. Rigo was more in charge, which is what a gorilla group expects from its silverback.

It sounds like just another day in the office, right? Well, maybe not in every respect. Damian makes the point that the objective of this gorilla team is simple and straightforward: to reproduce. Yet even such a natural objective gets complicated and derailed by the dynamics and politics of the group.

IMPLICATIONS OF THIS INSTINCT FOR LEADERS

Here’s a snapshot of what we have learned about the family element of the instinct of social belonging.

1 We gain our identity as a member of a small intimate group of around seven people.

2 We carry this as if family model with us into our workplaces.

3 Yet our work team cannot really be family—that’s the preserve of direct family members.

4 Hence a leader in modern workplaces is challenged with a paradox of leading a family size group which desires to act as if it is family but can never be and should not be so.

There are significant practical implications of our natural family condition which, if incorporated into your toolkit, will make managing people easier.

Implication 1. Team size

The size of a team determines whether it is set to be functional or dysfunctional. To be designed to be functional, teams should number around seven members.

If a manager is leading a team much smaller than five or larger than nine, it’s useful to know that there will be some unnatural challenges.

A small team of, say, two people is too small for those two individuals to feel a sense of belonging. Typically, small teams suffer a sense of isolation. Small teams should be merged or at least connected at the next level so that individuals have a sense of belonging to a family-sized unit.

Teams can be too big. If a team is larger than nine people then the team is too large for people to have an intimate sense of connection and too large for the manager to lead.

In some organisations teams swell to 15, 20 or even 30 people. Be aware that such over-sized teams create a foundation of dysfunction. The leader is not able to spend the necessary time with each person. The team will struggle to deliver outputs. Team members become frustrated that the leader can’t respond to their requests fast enough. Factions or cliques will emerge in the team. This group is way beyond the size with which we bond intimately.

A group of middle managers of a manufacturing business shared with me their recent experience. They had teams of around 30 people reporting to their team leaders. The teams were structured around this size in order to save ‘unproductive headcount’ of managers. The assumption was that because the work of the 30 staff was routine production work, the structure could work. Frustrated with the low level of productivity in the group and after trying a range of possible solutions, the managers finally changed the structure and appointed team leaders to lead teams of around seven. Instantly the facility became more productive. Decision-making sped up, production obstacles were removed, groups were more efficiently in touch with each other and resources were more appropriately allocated.

The ideal is seven, plus or minus two, meaning between five and nine. This team size applies irrespective of the level of the organisation. A senior team of 14 will be too big for the executive members to gain a sense of intimate connection. Cliques will most likely form. A team this size will have duplicated functions and a width of coverage too broad for the head of the team to sufficiently cope. For senior executives a team size of five to nine is functional for another reason—such a team will naturally represent the range of functions that the CEO will need a line of sight to. These roles will represent the voices the CEO needs at the table for effective decision making. If the CEO has many more than nine voices, it can almost be guaranteed that voices will be duplicated and energies diluted. With such a large team the CEO will also be trying to skate across too many subjects and the operation will be hampered.

Flight Centre is a global organisation employing around 14,000 people in the travel industry. The company is regularly awarded Best Employer status in countries where it operates. One reason for its ongoing success is that it bases its organisational structure on human instinct principles which it calls ‘family, village and tribe’. In its retail travel stores, call centres and central functions, Flight Centre has teams of no more than seven staff. According to the Human Resources Director, Michael Murphy, ‘Any time we compromised the rule of seven and even had eight staff in a store, productivity dropped. From painful experience, we will not compromise team size, our family team, of seven in number. This family unit is a foundation of our business, both in terms of the connection of people and the accountability of managers.’

For Flight Centre, if a store is generating business that justifies more than seven people then the company opens another store in the same neighbourhood. The company will pay the extra infrastructure costs of a second store rather than suffer the predictable decline in productivity that accompanies a team larger than seven.

Flight Centre wisely knows that it’s impossible for staff to connect to a human group of 14,000. However, they also know that they can have a highly engaged group of staff if there is a strong sense of belonging. If staff members are highly connected at the local level within their team of seven and in their village of around 80 people then the company has a band of loyal, energetic people. The company has replicated this model around the world and attributes its growth, stability and sustainability to this principle.

Implication 2. Role of leader

The human instinct to connect with a small group of others gives clarity to the critical role of the team leader.

The natural condition for human family groups is to have a leader. This need for a leader of work teams applies irrespective of whether you manage a team of front-line sales staff, call centre operators or lead the top team. The team leader’s task is to be the effective leader of a family-sized group.

This role as the leader of a group of humans is both empowering and also carries with it obligations. It is indeed empowering for a leader to know that their people want someone in the leader role. Our natural model for our small group of intimates is to have a leader. The single leader model is still present in the natural family of mum and dad because both parents need to work as one and not allow mum to be played off against dad and vice versa—in functional families the two parents act ‘as if ‘ there was one leader/parent.

New managers are often uncertain of their role and power, so this insight should help them to have increased confidence in their leadership role. The team wants and needs them to be the leader. It also helps leaders promoted from within the team to make a quick transition from peer to leader. If the new manager continues to act as peer versus leader, they are leaving a leadership vacuum.

Yet there are also certain obligations that come with the team leader role. If the leader doesn’t fill those obligations then there can be only one result for human groups—without a leader the group will become dysfunctional. The same thing happens to chimpanzees in the absence of a single leader. Dr Goodall witnessed a two-year period amongst the Gombe chimps when there was no single leader of the community. There were two males competing for the top position, so during those two years the community was in chaos. One of the measures of dysfunction, she says, was that the other males used the opportunity to try to improve their social position and mating success. Only when one of the males achieved dominance did the community return to normal and harmony was restored.

So on the one hand people are fine about having a person fill the role of leader. But the leader also needs to sign up for the obligations that come with the leader role. The leader must:

 set the vision and direction for the team so people have context for their role

 connect the group to the rest of the organisation so they can see the value they provide

 be an advocate for the team

 provide appropriate resources so people can succeed

 defend the team against unreasonable demands of others

 set goals so people have clarity in their role

 give feedback to help people learn and grow

 value people’s contributions

 provide an environment where people can progress to enhance their social standing

 take care in bringing new members into the team

 set the standards of behaviour and performance

 hold to account those people who don’t work to those standards

 minimise rivalries, address any conflict within the team and ensure harmony.

If the leader doesn’t deliver on these dimensions the group will be weakened, will be dysfunctional, performance will suffer, the leader will be considered inadequate and members of the team will want out to go join a functional team that acts as if it’s a family.

Implication 3. Gaining loyalty as though people elected the leader

Repeatedly, we are reminded of the impact managers have on staff engagement and retention. The Corporate Leadership Council conducted a study on the work attribute that most causes people to stay with their current organisation. The study explored 23 job attributes to find what people are least likely to trade off to leave one organisation to join another. It might surprise that the one attribute least likely to be traded wasn’t work challenge or location or company reputation or base salary. The attribute least likely to be traded off was manager quality. That is, if a person works for a good boss then they are not likely to change jobs, and as the study showed, if a person works for a good manager then any next employer has to offer so much more to attract that person away from their current job.

It’s clear that bosses are important and have a significant impact on people’s morale and output. Leaders should maintain a focus on serving their team. While it’s most likely that the team leader was appointed to their role by their own boss, a guiding principle should be that if the team was asked, they would elect their boss to indeed be their leader and along the way would re-elect them to remain in office.

Implication 4. Protection of the family unit

An extension of our mental framework of belonging to a small intimate work group as if we are family is that we expect the leader to protect members of the team. We expect a manager not to compromise the interests of the group in favour of their own. We expect a manager to protect us from criticism, to protect our resources and keep us from being overloaded and under-appreciated.

Of course, we shouldn’t expect managers to fight for us as much as they would their real family. For primates, protection of family is also primal. Close family genetic ties can sometimes lead to dark behaviour. Taronga chimps Koko and her daughter Kamili on one occasion attacked Shabani when he was an infant. Shabani’s mother, Shiba, came to her son’s rescue. A year later Kamili had her first offspring. Shiba, presumably holding a grudge that had festered over the year, attacked and killed Kamili’s newborn. Perhaps the score was settled, or perhaps the family feud was consolidated.

Implication 5. integrating new members

Like the gorilla Mbeli joining the group, the dynamics of a newcomer to a team can be delicate and the leader plays a key role in effectively integrating new members to the team.

Primates have a cute way of signalling that a youngster needs to be given time to learn the society’s ways. Chimps and gorillas are born with a tuft of white hair around their bottom. The infant will have this white tuft until around the age of four or five. The keepers call this tuft a ‘learner’s plate’. While they have this tuft of hair they are given great latitude by the adults. They are allowed to take food, to jump on the adults, punch the alpha and generally run amuck. After all, the little chimp doesn’t know any better. It’s like the latitude we give to a toddler. But when the young chimp starts losing its tuft of white hair, then it’s welcome to the adult world! As the youngster starts to be disciplined and first incurs the wrath of an adult, this can be quite a shock.

New members need to be integrated into the work group. In instincts terms the challenge is to quickly move new members from stranger status to in-group status. Through the lens of human instincts, leaders need to look after the basics of integration: of having equipment and space ready for the person on their first day, of informal introductions to break the ice, of providing clarity of the group’s purpose and values and to facilitate the new person becoming an immediate contributor to the group’s purpose. The lens also explains why the team leader should take the lead in the integration and not be too quick to pass the person to others, a theme we return to at various places in this book.

Implication 6. Freeloaders and social rejection

For a social animal, rejection from the group is of ultimate significance. On the savannah plains to be stranded alone or with just your family without group support would most likely be catastrophic. No wonder managing poor performers to the point of dismissal is one of the hardest things a manager gets to do. A social animal would not take such a situation lightly.

Yet as long as we have been around human societies have needed to respond when it has a freeloader in its ranks, when someone is flouting group culture or harming group success. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, anthropologist Christopher Boehm outlines the four levels of increasing sanction that human groups traditionally deploy to discipline a difficult member. First the person might be treated as a nonperson (ignored). If that didn’t do the trick, then the person might be shunned (ostracised so nobody cooperates with them) after which they might be expelled from the group and the ‘ultimate distancing is execution’. As we might talk about at work that the objective of attending to a poor performer is to try to correct their behaviour rather than result in termination, Boehm points out that, ‘Social control … is often about pro-socially oriented manipulation of deviants so that they can once more contribute usefully to group life.’

Instincts helps explain a leader’s discomfort in confronting and perhaps threatening termination of employment of a team member, yet also provides a message to leaders that every so often a leader might need to address asocial behaviour of an individual for the benefit of the group. This has been an aspect of human living and a leader’s lot for the duration of our history.

Clan

Apart from our family-sized group, there is a second group that gives us our sense of identity and which is critical to humans as social animals. This group is known as our clan and, in the natural course, comprises up to 150 people.

Social living was the key survival strategy for early humans. The savannah was a hostile and short-lived place for a solitary human or even a small lonely family. Compared to other animals on the plains of Africa also battling to survive, humans don’t have the same natural survival tools—we’re not strong like an elephant, we don’t run fast like a cheetah, we don’t fly like eagles or vultures, we don’t have sharp night vision like a cat and we’re not armed with poison like a scorpion. Our method of survival was social living—our families gathered in groups.

Group size is related to the size of the human brain. Our brain size allows us to associate with groups of up to around 150 others. Oxford professor Robin Dunbar is an expert on the topic. He argues that living in complex social groups demands a significant amount of intellect. Being a social animal, to get on you need to know who’s connected to whom, which family is not getting on so well with another, who is on the outer with the leaders and who recently won favours. This takes a fair amount of brain power. Dunbar has found a link between the ratio of brain to body size and the group size of animals (well, more accurately the ratio of the neocortex and body size). Humans have the biggest brain per body size of any animal on the planet. This larger brain allowed us to live in bigger groups than, say, chimpanzees, gorillas or monkeys. On Dunbar’s analysis the brain per body ratio of humans correlates to a community size of 150, which is indeed the size of primitive, or natural, human groups.

Chimpanzees are the second brainiest animals on the planet. They have the second largest brain per body size. On Dunbar’s analysis, chimpanzees would live in groups of around 55 on average in the wild, which is what happens. The main Gombe community, the Kasekela clan, numbers around 50 chimps.

For animals with a survival strategy based on family groups, there are great incentives for families to gather together. For starters, it’s the best defence against predation where bigger numbers can protect each other. There’s also attraction in sharing duties and sharing the search for food. In sourcing food, there’s a fair chance that if you miss out on finding food for a few days your family might not starve because another family will have enough to share, as yours did last time or might do next time.

The magical 150 appears in various places.

 On Facebook the average number of friends in a network is 120.

 For most people, if you take the time to list your friends and acquaintances your list will total around 150.

 The ex-global CEO of Proctor & Gamble was personally involved in the career planning for a key group of 150 high potential people.

 The prehistoric Tonga navy, a highly effective conquering force, built war canoes that were powered by 150 rowers.

If 150 is the number of people we naturally associate with, we have a fundamental challenge when our organisation grows beyond that size. Our brains are just not large enough for individuals to associate with and gain identity in organisations of 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000. Our brains are not big enough to manage the social and political complexities in groups significantly beyond 150. In larger organisations, then, people will naturally associate with their department, subsidiary or geography of a human scale of up to 150. ‘Silos’ will naturally occur in large organisations, so any search for an organisational structure that removes silos in large organisations will be rather fruitless (although senior leaders can mediate to reduce the natural sub-allegiances and selfish rivalry). The better organisational design question is to ask, ‘Where do we want the silos to form?’ Large organisations numbering way beyond the normal human number for connectedness will fracture into groups that individuals can most associate with.

The significance of 150 is further demonstrated by what repeatedly happens when small organisations grow towards that number. Consistently, people in organisations experiencing growth toward and beyond that threshold start to say, ‘It’s not as friendly as it used to be’, and, ‘We don’t know everyone like the old days’. Often in these smaller organisations the founders sense but don’t consciously realise the increased complexity that occurs when the organisation grows closer and then beyond the 150 mark. At this point the complexity is not linear—it’s exponential. When the organisation was 20 people then 30 then even 70 the founder knew each person well and was close to the job each person performed. As the organisation grows beyond 100 or so the founder can’t be across the level of detail that they used to be. They also start to rely, or should rely, on another level of management. Often the founder, not realising the significance of the growth, has not put in place the necessary processes, systems and capabilities to manage the growth in a sustainable way.

A significant implication of our clanning instinct is that we have an inherent fear of strangers. Over the millennia of our hardwiring circuitry, strangers mostly meant no good. More likely than not, they represented disputes over territory and competing claims over resources. In large organisations, colleagues outside our clan are like strangers. A ‘them and us’ occurs within the organisation, usually on geographical, functional or business unit lines.

Chimpanzees also display strong ‘them and us’ behaviours. At one point Dr Jane Goodall observed the Gombe community fracture into two groups, perhaps due to the increased population beyond the natural sized group. The smaller breakaway group took up occupation of a neighbouring territory. Competitive group rivalries boiled over into brutal warfare. Over the following two years, the main established group hunted down and killed all members of the splinter group. And these were individuals that up until recently had been part of their community.

While in organisational life our response might be more subtle, the intent is not such a long way from the Gombe chimp actions—we become protective of our in-group, we battle for resources, we talk disparagingly of the other department and conflicts can be more emotional with intra-organisation groups that we should by rights be friends with!

We will talk more about silos and the implications for leaders in the next chapter. At this point let’s look at the implications of the clan size of 150. I won’t go into as much detail as I did for the family-sized leader because the focus of this book is the role of the leader of immediate teams rather than leaders of the ‘village’ or the ‘tribe’.

The implications for leaders

First, the decision-makers in charge of organisational design should take into account natural clan formation in the structure of the organisation. We can create structures where the organisation uses group size advantageously. If we design our organisation according to human instincts we will harness natural energy. If we ignore human nature there’s a good chance we will design dysfunction into the system.

Gore Associates is the highly regarded firm and maker of GoreTex. Gore deliberately uses group sizes of 150. When Gore builds a new facility it provides car spaces for only 150 cars. When the car park starts to reach capacity, it’s time to build a new facility.

I referred earlier to Flight Centre. With its ‘family, village, tribe’ strategy, Flight Centre groups a certain number of family-sized stores or teams together in their geography so that there are around 80 to 100 people in a village. These village groups are encouraged to select nicknames for themselves, to create an identity, and the annual primary recognition awards go to a village group. Flight Centre in effect uses the clan-size concept to foster a healthy sense of rivalry rather than allow the rivalry to emerge in an unplanned and unmanageable way.

Second, senior executives, knowing the natural inclination for bonding is around 150, can guard against behaviours that undermine the cohesion of larger groups. Knowing that intra-organisational rivalries will tend to appear, a chief executive can choose to be watchful and move quickly to stop the behaviour. And for a CEO it’s handy to know that intra-group rivalries are accelerated because of the behaviour of the CEO who favours one division or function over the others which quickly causes cliques within the top team that cascade through the organisation (we will return to this point under the instinct of gossip).

Third, the role of department leaders—leaders of the village-sized group of up to 150 staff—is critical. After a person’s immediate manager, the divisional leader is the next most critical person who provides people with a sense of belonging within their work community. The divisional and department leader sets the culture and provides harmony within the clan. The department leader needs to:

 know the names of all their people

 know the important things that define them as individuals

 know their role and they must know the leader values their role

 establish the direction, goals and purpose of the clan

 create an environment where the managers pull together

 convene social functions so people have a sense of community

 coach their first-level managers to address any community freeloaders who are diminishing the community’s efforts and interests.

Fourth, for hierarchical animals like humans, team leaders (including senior executives) should be conscious of the distribution of power in their team. In particular, leaders (and designers of organisations) should avoid the concentration of power in a single direct report. That is, avoiding the formal or informal deputy or 2IC (‘second in charge’) where one person in the team of reports carries extra power differentiating them from the rest.

One CEO shared with me the negative consequences of a structure where a Chief Operations Officer reporting to him had much more power than the rest of his direct reports. The COO had the key operating units and most of the organisation’s staff reporting to her. The imbalance of power in the hands of one direct report weakened both the CEO and also the functioning of the organisation.

Fifth, the first-level leaders of family-sized groups need to connect their team to other family groups in the clan. Team leaders need to manage the natural tension of both providing for their family (so they are not taken for granted or lose out on resources) while ensuring they deliver the outputs on which other family groups within the clan are relying. Team leaders need to ensure that their people are seen and valued by higher-level managers as part of the individuals’ social progression, and to ensure that higher-level management is seen and involved with the team so the team members feel connected and well regarded.

Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan knew the importance of organisational structure. In 1203 he undertook a major restructure of his army using principles closely aligned to human instincts as the basis.

The results of Genghis Khan’s restructure were spectacular. Applying today’s business terminology, we would say he was the leader of a high performing organisation! Here are the highlights of his performance review: He united the Mongol people for the first time in their history. In a 25 year period his army conquered more people than the Romans conquered in 400 years. He organised history’s largest free trade zone (the famous Silk Road). He created the first international postal system. He created a system of international law. He recognised religious freedom and financially supported Christian, Buddhist and Moslem faiths. His creative and fearsome military capability made walled cities redundant as a defence against attack. On the balanced scorecard, his staff were highly engaged and no general ever deserted him throughout his six decades as a warrior.

His organisational challenges were as complex as a modern global CEO’s, with 100,000 warriors spread from China through India and the Middle East across to Hungary and Russia.

Genghis Khan used family-sized groups as his organisational foundation, arranging warriors into squads of ten ( arban; granted, slightly more than the ideal 5-9 range). No matter what their kin group or tribal origin, they were ordered to live and fight together as loyally as brothers. No one could ever leave another behind in battle as a captive. As in the family model of the day, the eldest took the leadership position in the group of 10, but the men could also choose another to be their leader.

This legendary warrior was serious about the role of the family-sized group. His law recognised group responsibility and group guilt. The family group was responsible for ensuring correct behaviour of its members. Giving a whole new dimension to performance management, a crime by one could bring punishment to all!

He used clan-sized groups as his next layer. Ten of the squads formed a company (zagun) of 100 men, one of whom they selected to be their leader. Ten companies formed a battalion ( mingan) of 1,000 men. Ten mingan formed a tumen of 10,000, the leader of whom was chosen by Genghis.

He also had an elite personal bodyguard numbering … wait for it … 150 soldiers!

It’s really not surprising that Genghis Khan would organise his ‘workforce’ according to human instincts. Given that we are talking about the human condition, that knowledge was as available then, 800 years ago, as it is today. It’s just that sometimes we forget and tend to overcomplicate things.

Families and clans are a key part of our survival strategy as a species. But social groups of smart animals can only function through a hierarchy or a pecking order. We now turn to that aspect of human instincts.