In a team, everyone has to know each other and everything that's going on in order to build trust and maintain a common purpose. This is doable in a small team, but impossible in a company where there are too many people, broken into silos, and too many things going on.In a company, the goal is for everyone to know someone on every other team, so that when they think about or have to work with another team, they envision a friendly face rather than a competitive rival.

Everyone must know someone in every team

Culture isn’t what you say. It's what you do, reward, tolerate, and repeat. And you're shaping it every day, whether you mean to or not. In a small startup, those signals are amplified and every action sets a precedent, so lead by example, even when you're moving fast.Pay attention to:<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">How decisions get made</li><li class="ql-align-justify">How problems get handled</li><li class="ql-align-justify">How you communicate and share information</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The habits you reinforce</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The behaviors you call out</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The things you let slide</li></ul>

Culture is shaped by what you do every day

As a leader, you should spend your time on decisions where you bring the most value. For everything else, empower your team to decide without waiting for your approval. It costs less to fix the errors you would have spotted than to wait for your approval and delay the decision.In the past, leaders approved everything because they had the most information, communication was slow, and companies moved at a predictable pace. But today, your team often knows more than you about what’s happening on the ground, and speed matters more than perfection.

Delegate decisions where you're not adding the most value

It’s tempting to play the heroic leader that makes decisions, solves problems, and saves the day. It feels productive and wins praise from your team and boss. But it turns you into a bottleneck and trains your team to wait for answers instead of taking ownership.Your real job is to shape the culture, setting up systems (routines, habits, communication flows) that keep your team in sync and help them solve problems on their own. You get faster decisions, more ownership, and a team that runs smoothly even when you're not around.It’s a shift from short-term control to long-term scale.

Your job is to shape the culture, not solve every problem

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

Scaling teams is hard and it's one of the main factors why many startups fail. Team dynamics are powerful but delicate, and expansion is a surefire way to break them."It's a fallacy that bigger teams are better than smaller ones because they have more resources to draw on. As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating rate." — J. Richard Hackman, Harvard sociology professor

Hiring more people breaks team dynamics

The way you organize your office space affects how people behave. The open office was created to encourage cooperation, spread ideas, and promote interaction between employees distant from one another on the org chart. As an executive, try to be as close to the open office as feasible, ideally within it, to keep a finger on the pulse of the company."If you lock yourself in your office, I don't think you can be a good executive", said Michael Bloomberg after he became mayor of New York City and converted a big hearing room into an open office with cubicles, and put himself in the middle of it.

Put executives in the same office as the employees

From the New York Times bestselling author of My Share of the Task and Leaders, a manual for leaders looking to make their teams more adaptable, agile, and unified in the midst of change. When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter. To defeat Al Qaeda, they would have to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network. They would have to become a "team of teams"—faster, flatter, and more flexible than ever. In Team of Teams, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be rel­evant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and or­ganizations today. In periods of unprecedented crisis, leaders need practical management practices that can scale to thousands of people—and fast. By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organiza­tion, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions.  Drawing on compelling examples—from NASA to hospital emergency rooms—Team of Teams makes the case for merging the power of a large corporation with the agility of a small team to transform any organization.