Page 40 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Crosswind Factors C27

of employee engagement—that the number of employees in the orga-
nization can make a big difference in how effectively people relate to
and work with one another. 1
Gladwell cites the research of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, which
indicates that we humans may have a limited capacity to effectively
work in groups. Dunbar’s theory—called channel capacity—suggests
that our brains have a channel capacity of roughly 150: “The figure
of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with
whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of rela-
tionship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to
us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not
feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened
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to bump into them in a bar.” Dunbar found many instances where
societies that had, without necessarily understanding this dynamic,
worked to maintain a group size below this number.
The Tipping Point offers examples of this theory that have likely im-
pacted the design of military units as well as other organizations, includ-
ing a religious order called the Hutterites, whose communities split as
they neared that magic number of 150. In the latter case, a leader in one
of the communities indicated that “when things get larger than that,
people become strangers to one another.” He continues: “If you get too
3
large, you don’t have enough things in common, and then you start to
4
become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost.” Aside
from relationship building, Gladwell also suggests that knowledge can
be more easily transmitted, shared, and stored in smaller groups.
In the world of business, Gladwell turns to the W. L. Gore Com-
pany in Newark, Delaware, as an example of an enterprise that has
applied this rule of 150 to its workplace. W. L. Gore is a very success-
ful business that has been recognized as an employer of choice by vari-
ous sources. As Gladwell explains, the company’s founder, Wilbert
“Bill” Gore, saw the value of keeping things small. Quoting Gladwell:
“‘We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and
fifty’ he [Gore] told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees
per plant became the company goal. In the electronics division of the
company, that meant that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square