The most critical people to recruit to build your team structure

Most people can fit in anywhere in a team. This is most true of the young who can modify their roles and the way they work to suit the business. However there are a couple of team members who have to be found independently and cannot as a rule be sourced from existing team members.

These are the ‘Completer Finishers’ and the ‘Idea Generators’.

Both of these roles are jobs which need introverts, so don’t expect one of your sales people to be able to do them.

Completer Finishers are excellent at completing the job and worry constantly about what might go wrong. They are only at ease when they have checked every detail and made sure everything has been done and nothing has overlooked. They can however become bullies as some team members need to be pushed to complete work and meet deadlines.

The Idea Generators are sometimes also called Plants and prefer to operate at some distance from the other members of the team and use their imagination to find unorthodox solutions to complex problems. They are the most intelligent members of their team and are much more concerned with major issues than with details. They may miss the details entirely and can upset other members of the team by belittling current work. However it is the Idea Generators who create companies and launch new products.

You will see companies that do this on the Top 20 page at https://gibli.com/top-20 because they have found the critical the ‘Completer Finishers’ and the ‘Idea Generators’.

Team, division and company sizes

Many studies have now confirmed that the ideal team size is five people. This is confirmed by the biggest teams ever to have existed as Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill all had top level teams of five people during WW11.

Academic studies now show that these teams can come together and escalate using the number 3. That means that if your team is composed of five people, then these can come together to make managerial teams of 15, and these can come together to make divisions of 45 and these come together to make companies of 135.

This means that the manager at each level has just three teams or divisions to control and therefore three managers or representatives to work with.

They function rather like the layers in an onion and the 135 is interestingly close to the Dunbar’s number 150 which is the common community size in human social organisations and the typical size of personal social networks.

Of course this results in a very hierarchical organisation and can lead to problems getting information, support and help up and down the structure. However with just five people in the teams and three in each managerial team the focus is likely to be much more intense than with larger numbers.

You will see companies that do this on the Top 20 page at https://gibli.com/top-20 because they employ the best people and look after their customers very well.