What’s the difference between managing a large team and a small team?

A small team comes with specific advantages and disadvantages. As a manager of a small team, you might be very familiar with these, and so have become accustomed to dealing with these challenges. You might be used to working in a close knit group, where everyone knows each other on what might be an informal basis for a business. Knowing everyone personally means you know what motivates each person and what makes them come into work every day.

Creating a larger team can mean unlocking a bigger pool of resources, which might help you compete with other companies as you grow. It can also put a strain on your own resources as a team leader, meaning that you may have to rethink some of your own responsibilities, too.

Managing a large team, then, brings a new set of conditions into the picture. Below, we’ll run through some ideas for managing a large team that you might find useful in this situation.

Focusing on communication

When managing large teams, you might have to rethink the way that you communicate with your employees. This will depend on whether you’re working together in an office, or if some of you are working from home. In which case, project management tools and instant messaging tools for businesses might help you to stay connected every day with all your employees. You might actually decide that to keep things running smoothly, that you’ll need some face-to-face meetings with remote employees from time to time.

Not only that, you’ll probably looking at how effectively your large team is communicating within itself. This includes whether employees are able to get through to the right people in their team for support, or are able to delegate tasks appropriately. Making sure that everyone is using the same tools to communicate may also help you to manage a larger team. That way, you can also link everyone into conversations, or create separate groups based on who is handling which project (or which part of a project).

Strengthening your relationships

This naturally follows onto the idea that in order to manage a larger team, it’s useful to focus on building relationships with those employees who are part of your management level. This way, you’re able to stay connected with each team’s progress, as well as adequately communicate strategies to the right people. Making an effort with everyone no matter which level of the hierarchy they’re in can also be an important dimension of managing a larger team. You’re essentially reminding them that they are a valuable asset to your company, and helps you to gain better insight into the role everyone plays.

Boosting your management and staff morale

If you’re able to instil confidence into your management, this is likely to make them feel more confident and driven about the goals that they’re trying to achieve within their team. Ways to do this include encouraging them to feel responsible for their team’s strategy and its execution. You’ll also probably be wanting to keep everyone excited about business goals, which is why it can also be useful to check in with your staff in general to make sure that they’re happy.

Positive reinforcement and constructive feedback can help staff learn about what they’re getting right, as well as where they can improve. Overall, you’re looking to build their confidence in their ability to lead, while also helping them to learn new ways of effectively leading their team. Leaving them to handle problems on their own can lower morale, but micromanaging can also have negative consequences — it can make them feel like they’re not doing a good enough job. 

Working with feedback

Your managers and staff might provide feedback of their own about how your business strategy is working out. While you might not think all feedback is important to consider, if staff are voicing similar concerns or are excited about a project, this gives you an overall picture about how your team(s) are feeling. As this can be more difficult when working with a larger team, you might gather feedback from managers. Gathering data from surveys or questionnaires is another option for getting opinions from your employees on a larger scale. 

When working with a large team, you might decide it’s easier to be more economical about when you gather feedback. You might choose to do so before a change in strategy, at the end of the year, or if your company is going through major organisational change. Asking questions that are meaningful can help draw more out of your employees, especially when creating a survey or questionnaire.

Becoming more comfortable with delegating to managers

When you’re managing a larger team, you might find it increasingly hard to juggle the responsibilities of doing so. Therefore, there might come a point where you find it easier and more effective to start delegating some of those tasks to management staff in your business. Deciding who might be right for each type of task can be part of this, as some managers might be better equipped for certain responsibilities than others. This also gives you more time and the resources to deal with bigger priorities for your business.

Streamlining your recruitment process

You can also make building a large team easier by making your recruitment strategy more efficient. If you’re looking to grow, you’ll probably be starting to look for strong external candidates. This could involve putting more effort into outreach or fine tuning your company brand (which can influence how you come across to prospective candidates). Candidates often put a lot of weight into how job advertisements and descriptions are phrased, so making sure they’re clear and have the right voice can potentially go a long way.

Retaining your employees

It then makes sense that retaining your pre-existing employees is useful if you’re looking to build and manage a large team. Honing your retention strategy can help make sure that your current employees are happy, which can become all the more important if your team is growing. After all, your current employees might be feeling resistant to change, or even lost in a team with more people. Communicating regularly with your employees during a period of transformation like this might be one way of encouraging them to stay.

Revising company policy and your employee handbook

When your team grows, you might be looking to streamline or update your standard operating procedures as well. That way, your team is better equipped for any new changes that come with having more people in it. You might want to revisit employee life cycles, as well as onboarding and orientation processes. This could involve delegating these processes to certain managers, so you’re not stretching yourself too thin when overseeing procedures. If all of your employees have a good understanding of what’s expected of them, they’re likely to work more harmoniously as part of a larger team.

While managing large teams can feel difficult to begin with, there are some ways to make this easier. By communicating regularly with your teams as well as delegating less important tasks to your management, you can take some of the pressure off. In doing so, you can free up time better spent dealing with business strategy or high priority tasks.