TBM 50/52: The Small, Shared, Specialist, New Team Challenge
Are you on a small team, shared team, specialist team, or new team?
Are you under extra scrutiny?
Does it feel like no one trusts you? That you need to sell your work more than other teams?
Well, there are reasons for this.
Time is Time
A thirty-minute meeting discussing a $ 10,000,000-a-year investment takes the same thirty minutes as a meeting discussing a $ 500,000-a-year investment. One meeting invests a minute per $333,333 invested. One meeting invests a minute per $16,666 invested. Time is time.
You could argue that the team should invest time proportionate to the investment, but that can take a lot of work. People still have things to say, and there’s a baseline attention startup cost.
The net effect is that smaller investments can receive disproportionately higher scrutiny.
Sharing May Not Be Caring
Imagine a “shared team” with a $2,000,000/yr budget. That shared team is integral to a cumulative $20,000,000 investment across multiple groups. Understandably, none of those teams want to invest an extra $2,000,000 for a dedicated team. Suddenly, the team with 10% of the budget is getting disproportionately higher scrutiny.
Also: $2,000,000 buys you a lot less when dealing with that scrutiny. So not only is the scrutiny proportionately higher—the team has fewer resources to deal with it! And, to top it off, the details are challenged more aggressively because there’s competition for their precious bandwidth.
Niche or Nietzsche?
Niche skill sets are harder to hire for AND can be a lot harder for other people to understand. A team of twenty engineers who “build stuff our customers use” is easier to understand than a team of three DX engineers who increase internal productivity, a UXR who does expert qualitative research, or community, content, data science, analytics, search, etc.
Niche teams spend a disproportionate amount of time translating between reality and perceptions. If they aren’t “in the room,” there is a high likelihood that someone will misinterpret what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Best case: the time pays off—the typical case is a continuous, uphill battle.
“But Can They?”
Teams that lack support and funding sometimes “underperform.”
The Business is less likely to invest in teams that underperform. Skepticism increases. Doubt increases. Debt increases. Other teams work around the overburdened teams. Workarounds increase the perception that underperforming teams may not be required. New managers try to “fix” the problem and have a higher probability of failing. It is a wicked loop.
The net effect is that these teams can become “problem teams” and take on a life of their own. While money is flowing freely and largely without issue/scrutiny to high-inertia efforts, suddenly, a relatively minor decision—doubling the budget of a small team—becomes a disproportionately large issue. The “big” efforts increase budgets by clicking and dragging formulas in Excel—$20,000,000 to $22,000,000 with no problem. Meanwhile, doubling the $1,000,000 budget team becomes a Huge-Deal-That-Lots-Of-People-Have-Ideas-About.
As we learned in the Sharing May Not Be Caring section, the net IMPACT of doubling that budget might be far more significant than the modest 10% increase in the High-Inertia budget. But management will hem and haw endlessly about the issue.
Law of Bigger (and Smaller) Numbers
Increasing a team from two to three is a large percentage increase (50%)—$250k more for one person. This increase trips the “big increase” flag. Meanwhile, the thirty-person team adding three people adds $750k to their budget with a “modest 10% increase”.
Low-and-behold, there’s a conditionally formatted red cell in the budget spreadsheet. Almost doubling the team size, no way! $750k? Sure. $250k? Woah now.
Net-New
People have a lot of say about NEW things because it is easy to say something about new things. It is much harder to talk about the efficacy of current investments—especially if those teams aren’t doing a horrible job (and especially if there’s a lot of inertia around people claiming they are doing a good job).
Consider the difference between a startup with three people getting to work and the administrative overhead accompanying three people trying to do something new in a big organization. OMG. The jealousy (yes, it exists—everyone wants to do something new). The administrative overhead! New recs. New! New = hard. Watch out!
It all adds up. With a small team, there is nowhere to hide. Things are very real.
So what is the point here?
All kinds of biases disproportionately impact small teams, shared teams, specialist teams, and new teams. It isn’t easy. You do not imagine it.
In a follow-up post, I will delve into ways to combat this.
Hopefully, seeing the biases listed out will help you frame the challenge.