You know, so many leaders believe that growth means adding more people. But I've seen it time and time again. Adding more people doesn't automatically make things better. In fact, without structure, clarity, and culture, it can multiply the chaos. Hello and welcome to another episode of Leveraging Operations and Leadership, the podcast where we bridge the gap between strong leadership and solid operations. I'm your host, Tanya D. Harrison, a leadership and operations consultant, and today we're kicking off a new focus, one that's all about helping small teams make a big impact. Today I want to challenge the idea that growth means adding more people. Think about it. What if, just what if, less could actually lead to more? More clarity, more collaboration, and more results. Yeah, I said it, more results. That's exactly what we're talking about in this episode. How small teams can drive big impact when they lead with intention, structure, and focus. Here's the truth: small teams are not at a disadvantage at all, they are an opportunity. There's a common belief that you need a big team to make big impact, but impact doesn't come from head count, it comes from clarity, consistency, and alignment. According to 2024 Zen Business Report, nearly 70% of small business owners say managing people is the hardest part of running their business. That tells me the challenge isn't size, it's structure. When you have a small team, you actually have an incredible advantage. You can pivot faster, you can make decisions faster, you can build a culture that reflects your values from the ground up. Small teams have something large organizations often struggle with, and that's agility. The first thing is the speed of clarity. When your team is small, clarity becomes your competitive advantage because clarity creates speed. Clarity eliminates hesitation, it replaces guesswork with confidence and allows your team to move quickly and make decisions without waiting for approval or direction. You see, in larger organizations, messages pass through layers. You have your CEO, you know, your executive team, your senior management team, or your senior leadership team. And then you have your middle management, director, manager, sometimes supervisor, team lead, all the way down to the actual frontline employees. So you have a lot of layers that things have to go through. Priorities shift, but it's not as easy to make the shift. Projects get stuck waiting on decisions. But see, here's the thing with small teams they can meet in the morning, decide by lunch, and be executing by the afternoon if everyone understands the mission and their role in it. Clarity answers the questions that slow teams down. When those questions are answered up front, your team moves faster. They stop second guessing themselves and they start producing sooner. So let's be honest. Confusion is expensive. It will cost you your time, your energy, and your trust. But clarity builds alignment and alignment builds momentum. Because clarity isn't about control, it's about confidence. It gives your team permission to act. If you are leading a small team, I want you to think about an area that needs more clarity. Start there because when you create clarity, you create capacity. That's number one. That's the first advantage. The speed of clarity. The second advantage is culture by design, not default. Every team has a culture, regardless of the size. The only question is whether it's happening by design or by default. When your team is small, culture isn't something you hang on the wall. It's something you live out every day. And it's more visible because it's not as many people. It's how you communicate, it's how you solve problems, it's how your team defines what good work looks like. Culture forms whether you plan it or not. So what you want to do is you want to design it. And when your team is small, one wrong hire or one unchecked behavior can shift everything. That's why culture must be built in with intention because it's harder to fix it later. You have to design it from the start. How you do this in small teams is you do it right out the gate when you hire. Right out the gate when you hire. In smaller teams, you build that culture intentionally through your hiring process. When your team is small, every hire matters. You're not just filling a role, you are actually adding a personality, an attitude, and a set of values to your team dynamic. And you can see it clearer and you can feel it faster. So you want to make sure that you are really taking your time to make the right hire. That's why hiring for values is just as important as hiring for skills. And it's even more important in smaller teams, like I said, because it's more visible. Some of these things can be masked in larger teams. It may take a little bit longer for some things to float up to the top, but that's not the case with smaller teams. However, when you do it right from the beginning, it's a lot easier with smaller teams. When you are hiring, you want to make sure that your candidate not just has the right experience and skills, but they have to align with your principles. Six people, small team. At the time we started working together, he needed to hire really fast because he was down two people. Now, when you are managing or leading a small team and you're down people, woo, that's a big deal. So if you have a team of six and you're down two people, that's a third of your team. That's a lot of work that's not getting done. As we started working together, it became really clear that the turnover wasn't just about work, it was about fit. The two team members that had left had the technical skills. He acknowledged that they had the skills to do the job, but they didn't align with the culture he wanted to build. And as we continued to have conversations, I asked him what his interview process looked like. And I noticed right away that when he was hiring, he was only considering skills. He did not consider values, he had real strong convictions around collaboration and innovation. This was extremely important to him. He wanted to bring in people that were like open to trying new ideas and willing to test concepts and that were confident enough to contribute creatively. He wanted innovative people. He wanted people that collaborated, but his interview questions didn't reflect any of that. So we went back, we redefined the process, we added in some questions that revealed how Canada's approach teamwork, creativity, problem solving, and things like that. The next two hires were completely different than two people that had left. Not only did they have the right experience, but they were a fit for the team. We considered what his values were, and we considered what the team dynamics were. And within weeks, let me tell you something. Within weeks, the entire dynamic of the overall team shifted. I mean, communication improved, morale was lifted. He felt better about his team, and performance skyrocketed. He was on his way to building a high-performing team. And that experience, it reminded me and him of something that was truly important. Skills can be developed, but values have to align. And that's something that's out of the gate. When I work with leaders of small teams, one of the things I talk to them about is values and motion. And this is really about the fact that culture isn't written on the wall, it has to be lived out in the work that we do. That's what values emotion is. It means that your values they show up in how your team does everything. I mean, from communicating, solving problems, how they support each other, how they provide feedback to each other, how you provide feedback to your team. It becomes more than a handbook or a slide deck or something that's on the website. It's visible, it's walked out, is lived out. Culture becomes consistent. And this is why I am always reminding leaders that you have to be cognizant of what the values of the organization is and how you are literally walking it out on a regular basis. Right? So we have to be thinking about that because our team is looking at that, and our team usually mimics that behavior, and they're going to exhibit that, and that becomes our culture. So culture has to be by design, not default. That's number two. The third advantage that small teams have is focus. Focus is the greatest strength. When your team is small, focus is your greatest strength. You don't have the capacity to chase every idea, to fix every problem, to try every platform, to do all of the things. That becomes a distraction. But when you focus, you are going to easily outdo a larger team. Focus isn't about, it's not about doing less. It's about doing more of the right things. It's about doing what matters the most and consistently doing what matters the most. Friction shows up when your priorities are unclear, when people start working hard, but not together. They're going off doing their separate things. They get busy, but they're not productive. And that's what leads to the burnout, the confusion, and the missed deadlines. And all of those things start to creep in. But your role as a leader is to protect the focus. That means setting clear, we're talking clarity again. That means setting clear priorities, defining what the boundaries look like, and ensuring your team isn't spreading its energy across. When everyone knows what matters most, productivity becomes natural. So when you have a small team and you set the direction and you are clear, you're going to accomplish more. And the great thing about it is that when you set the tone, when you say what the direction is, again, you don't have to go through a bunch of levels. It's easy to talk directly to the team. Because it's not that many of them. So that's an advantage. Think about where your team may be experiencing the most friction right now. Or think about if there's an opportunity to provide additional clarity around what the focus needs to be. Because again, you have to remember you have a small team. You don't want them going in a bunch of different directions. This is only an advantage if you set the focus properly. If that's not the case, then it becomes a disadvantage really quickly because you have a small team. So you really want to make sure that you are focusing. Clarity is going to give you speed. Culture gives you strength. Focus gives you direction. And to sustain it all, you need structure. So those are three advantages of small teams. And when you implement these things, you are going to see your performance skyrocket. Before you hire, implement some of these things first and see where your team can go. Small teams don't need to do more, they need to do more of what matters most. You don't have to scale in size to scale your impact. You just need to align your people, your processes, and your priorities, and you are definitely going to see the results. Now, if you really want to take some of these principles to the next level, be sure to check out the Leadership Shift Coaching program. This is my one-on-one program where I work with leaders of small teams to help them to build that clarity, the capacity, and what they need for their small teams to take them to the next level. Alright, so I'm gonna put the information in the show notes and you can go and you can check it out. You can even schedule a call with me so that we can see if this is something that aligns with what it is that you need and where it is that you are trying to go. And also, if you like this episode and leave a like and please share it with another link and some of the information, and take 30 seconds to give us my really have a break until my last day.