Limit your team: embrace the Two Pizza Rule

In today’s fast-paced business environments, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that bigger teams equate to better productivity. However, research has shown that smaller teams tend to have better communication, greater job satisfaction, and more creativity. This is where the Two Pizza Rule comes in. The Two Pizza Rule is a guideline put forward by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, stating that you should never have a meeting or a team that requires more than two pizzas to feed.

In this article, I will discuss in detail how embracing the Two Pizza Rule can enhance your team’s productivity, creativity, communication, and efficiency.

1. Smaller Teams Help Facilitate Communication:

Communication is one of the essential aspects of any collaboration. The larger your team, the more difficult it is to manage and foster the communication process. Meetings can become unproductive, and employees can quickly become lost in a sea of voices and opinions. Small teams are better equipped to handle internal communication and can ensure that every member is heard.

When you limit your team to a small group, you will have well-defined boundaries and less noise in your communication channels. Small teams can also facilitate cross-functional exchanges, which will improve your organization’s overall communication. It would be easier to coordinate everyone’s efforts and relay information faster.

This approach has been proven to be effective, even in bigger organizations. Facebook’s engineering team uses the Two Pizza Rule, despite being a company with thousands of employees.

2. Better Creativity:

Small teams tend to be more creative. The truth is, larger groups can stifle creativity as there’s a tendency to encourage conformity, as several stakeholders will seek a consensus on various decisions. It’s easy for individuals to lose their creativity and not speak up in large meetings.

However, smaller groups can offer a safe, low-risk space where people can share their ideas freely. Also, members of small teams are generally more passionate about the cause they’re working on.

Notably, it’s a misconception that more significant teams result in more innovation. Research shows that the most successful startups often begin with two or three founders. In fact, a 2012 study by Harvard Business Review found that 58% of new US jobs came from micro-businesses with fewer than ten employees.

3. Increased Efficiency:

Another benefit of smaller teams is increased efficiency. Do you know how many weeks it can take to get a room of 20+ people to all agree on what should be on the agenda for the next meeting? It can be an incredibly frustrating work experience.

In smaller groups, decision-making is more agile, and greater consensus is reached much faster. Smaller teams have fewer bureaucratic hurdles, which results in faster approval processes and faster delivery of outputs.

When you reduce the size of your team and adhere to the Two Pizza Rule, you’ll also have fewer projects and initiatives on the go at one time. This means your team can focus on delivering high-quality results without being overloaded with tasks.

In short, adopting the Two Pizza Rule is a surefire way to boost productivity through efficient work delivery.

4. Better Team Building:

One of the most significant selling points of small teams is how they create better team cohesion. Members of smaller teams tend to know each other better and can build positive relationships more effectively.

A smaller team creates more opportunities for employees to get to know each other, take interest in each other’s lives, and celebrate successes together. It’s easier to build a sense of community and trust in small teams because members interact more frequently. When you have more substantial teams, the probability of someone feeling isolated or lonely at work becomes higher. This factor could lead to decreased employee morale.

However, in small teams, there’s a bond that forms between members that only few can be replicated within more massive organizations.

5. The Two Pizza Rule Facilitates Decision-Making:

Few things are more frustrating than lengthy meetings where no one can seem to decide on anything. The Two Pizza Rule helps tackle this problem by limiting the number of people in meetings. Small teams are more conducive to decisive decision-making since there are fewer decision-makers involved.

Additionally, small teams can play off each other’s strengths, making them more efficient at problem-solving. The collective intelligence of small groups is more manageable and can bring about productive conversations without resorting to unproductive and lengthy debates.

When you embrace the Two Pizza Rule, you empower small teams to make and delegate decisions efficiently. This approach reduces bureaucracy and encourages autonomy and creativity.

6. Better Management:

When you’re managing a smaller team, you’re much better able to know the abilities of individual members and assign tasks to an individual’s strengths. It’s easier to know each person’s capacity, learn their strengths and weaknesses so that they can be put to the best use.

In small teams, there is less of a chance of members being overtasked and feeling burnt out since their work allocation is based on their strengths.

What’s more, smaller teams afford the opportunity for individualized feedback. Personalized feedback is essential in helping employees grow their skills, which boosts employee morale and can lead to better job satisfaction.

Conclusion:

Smaller teams, when done correctly, have been proven to facilitate better communication, creativity, efficiency, team building, decision-making, and management. However, the effectiveness of smaller teams relies on how well you manage the team, is it set up correctly and your leadership abilities.

Limiting your team is not an easy task, and it requires a great deal of discipline, and it’s easy to fall into the traps of wanting to build bigger teams for the sake of it. When you follow the Two Pizza Rule, you’ll position your team for higher productivity, better working relationships, and increased innovation.

In summary, the Two Pizza Rule is an effective way to enable focus, reduce bureaucracy, and encourage creativity in small teams. You should try it.