As teams grow, communication lines multiply fast: 4 people create 6 possible connections, 7 people create 21, 14 people create 91. Leaders need consistent weekly meetings, senior leadership syncs, quarterly state-of-the-company reviews, and clear routines to keep everyone aligned.
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This one for me is a big reason why my team has hit a little bit of a ceiling. When you look at if there's two of you on the team, it's really hard. Like, if it's just me and you talking every day, it's really hard for things to get confusing. Right, because we're talking to each other. Unless you're having thoughts and not carrying through. If it's the three of us, it's like, I can talk to you and I can talk to you and we're clear. But you guys talk to each other and it could get dysfunctional, it could get dramatic, it can get. All these things can happen. That's three people. When you go to four people, you know, the leader can talk to three people, but then the two people have two people to talk to. So there's only four people, but there's six lines of communication. When you get to seven, the leader has six people to talk to, but there's 21 lines of communication. So having a clear communication structure and just a simple way of doing things that even if this team tweaks the way they do something a little bit, nobody's unclear on what happens on their team. So every day this is what happens. Or every Tuesday, this is exactly what happens. Or every Friday, this is what happens. You report your numbers at this time every week. And just the consistency of that, because you're trying to grow your team even with four or five people, this is a big, big deal. And you may think that you're communicating to your team, but as. Especially as team leaders, I'm one of the worst communicators, where even everyone at that back table will tell you, and I've done it multiple times over and over again, where something that. It was so clear in my mind what I wanted to happen, and I literally told nobody, and I was pissed off. That didn't happen the way that it was in my mind, and it happens a lot for me anyway. So just realizing that you've got to be able to deal with this level of complexity and it just becomes chaotic. You've got to dumb everything down because you typically. And it's not a smart thing. So that's not the right word for it. But you're the person. We talked about it yesterday. You're the rock that creates all the ripples, right? So if you don't have a structure in place that helps contain that, it's going to get really messy really quick, and you're just going to live in a level of frustration all the time. So simplify the messages, the processes, the structure, the vision, the communication and ask yourself, is it as simple as possible? So for my team, we're over 14 people, but with 14 people on a team, there's 91 lines of communication with just 14 people. Can you imagine running like, I want to say, like a real company, like a company with a thousand employees. You know, the level of clarity and communication that there has to be. So we've gone to. But we still do our weekly team meetings, but with a different format. We're doing a weekly senior, sort of senior leadership meeting in a real estate company. We're doing quarterly state of companies with the team, which is important. We're going, we're picking rocks and we're reviewing those rocks and then we're talking about the next rocks. And it's just an open sort of clear the air meeting. But 91 lines of communication with only 14 people. I don't know what it looks like at 22 people, but it's a lot of lines of communication and it just becomes really, really. So it's got to have a lot of clarity around the communication.
