In a previous blog ( https://phillipmatthews.ie/seeing-your-team-as-a-system/ ) I talked about Seeing Your Team as a System and the importance of psychological safety. Well in this blog, I thought I’d talk about something that shapes the Team System and that can have an impact of the existence of psychological safety, and that is the quality of Intra-Team Relationships, or relationships within the team system.
If we consider a team of say 8 people, each team member has a unique relationship with his/her 7 colleagues, including the team leader. This means that there are 28 unique relationships within this team system; that’s a lot of individual relationships to get right, isn’t it?
Brook’s Law
The graphic below comes from Brook’s Law and it helps to visualise the complexity of relationships as teams get larger.
Brooks’s Law states that adding more personnel to a late software project can actually make it even later. This counterintuitive idea has implications for project management, as it suggests that simply increasing the number of developers may not always lead to faster completion. As the team grows, communication becomes more complex, and the time spent on coordination increases.
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” – Fred Brooks
For those of you who are interested, the formula for calculating this number is n*(n-1)/2 where “n” is the number of team members.
I’m using it here to illustrate the complexity of team systems as it relates to intra-team relationships.
Now, if one or two of those relationships is even a little dysfunctional, it will influence the team system and by inference, team performance. In my team coaching work, at some stage in the team coaching journey, we’ll look at each of these relationships to see where work may need to be done.
Think about the complexity in your team, how many intra-team relationships are there? And from your perspective, how would you rate each one of these relationships between your peers, team leader and you? I wonder how everyone else in your team would answer this?
