I have a couple of friends with very young children, like 3 months. I'm always amazed at how quickly they grow. One day they can't open their eyes, they next they're staring back in your face.

Always keen for a fun fact about large mammals, though, I must share that blue whales make that look slow. In their first months, calves drink ultra-rich milk (≈35–50% fat) and pack on ~200–250 pounds a day.

That’s 10 pounds an hour. Wild.

"Okay," you're thinking, "what does this possibly have to do with teams or work health?"

It's just to illustrate a point: if you're trying to scale a team, you need to be aware of the "fat", so to speak.

When you add one person to a team, you don’t add one relationship; you add a multiple of new lines to the relational matrix of your organization.

So if you have a team of 11 people and add one more, you're adding 11 relationships that need to maintained and managed.

Unlike baby blue whales that gain weight at a steady rate, the number of relationships on a team grows at an accelerating rate.

Each new team member adds more relationships than the previous member did - the growth gets faster and faster as the team gets larger.

On a team of 100, adding one person adds 100 relationships.

This period of growth--from a less than 30 to over 60 staff--is incredibly difficult.

We've helped many teams make this transition.

If there's one thing that works, it's to design for relationships. Performance will follow.

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P.S. Would you use a tool that shows the number of relationships in an organization at any size?