Why You Must Lead Differently As Your Team Grows

As your team grows, focus on a different component of the BRAVE leadership framework. The BRAVE approach helps leaders build their team by uniting them around a shared purpose, and it reflects an acronym that stands for behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and environment. Here’s a quick overview of what each means:

1. Behaviors – The actions that make real lasting impact on others.

2. Relationships – The heart of leadership. If you can’t connect, you can’t lead.

3. Attitudes – Encompassing strategic, posture, and culture choices around how to win.

4. Values – The bedrock of a high performing team. Get clear on what really matters and why.

5. Environment – Setting the context for everything else by understanding where you are playing.

If you are starting or joining a small team, lead with environment and values. Assess the competitive landscape to see how you’ll compete, and get clear on the values that will drive future decisions. Build everything else on these over time. Play where you can solve someone’s problem. Then assemble your early team of complementary partners. Not everyone on the team needs to have strategic, operational and organizational strengths. But someone on the team should, and all must buy in to the same values.

The key takeaway for leading small teams is to start by focusing on problem solving, values and creating momentum.

Once the team grows beyond a nuclear family with everyone reporting to one leader, the nature of how the team works changes. At this point, attitude starts to become more important. Get the strategy set, deciding at what you are going to be best in the world, and use that as your guide for how to grow the team and which capabilities to add first. With teams of 10-30 people or so, you’ll know everyone and can treat them like extended family. Even so, this is the time to implement rudimentary people-management and operating practices.

The lesson here is that as the team grows, emphasize differentiation and culture.

If the team has more than 30 people, you need to get over your natural abhorrence of hierarchy and start substituting some organizational and operating processes for your ability to know everyone on the team. With this size team, lead with relating and delegate appropriately. Work on the organization. Put in place enabling practices to scale. And remember the number one job of the leader is to own and reinforce vision and values. This gets ever more important (and complicated) as the organization grows.

In conclusion, when leading teams with more than 30 people work on the organization and enabling practices while reinforcing vision and values.

Suzanna Prout