In theory, doubling your team should double your productivity. But in reality, as teams grow, inefficiencies often creep in, slowing progress instead of accelerating it.
What can leaders learn from a Formula 1 pit crew? These teams replace all four tires on a race car in under two seconds. How? Precision, clarity, and trust. Every crew member knows their role, executes with focus, and works seamlessly with others. Applying these principles to your growing team can mean the difference between reaching your company’s goals—or falling short.
Here are four proven steps to grow your team while maintaining productivity and efficiency.
1. Build a Well-Oiled Machine
Every member of an F1 pit crew understands their responsibilities and how their performance impacts the race outcome. Your growing team needs this same clarity and alignment. As teams expand, it’s critical to ensure employees understand:
- Their role and responsibilities
- How their work impacts team success
- How the team’s outcomes align with company goals
Without this alignment, inefficiencies and silos can emerge, which derails progress. And as a team grows, this becomes even more important.
2. Identify and Leverage Strengths
Understanding your employees’ strengths is essential to building a high-performing team. Tools like the DiSC assessment provide valuable insights into individual work styles and motivators, helping leaders assign roles that play to their employees’ strengths.
For example, the DiSC framework categorizes individuals into four key traits:
- Dominance (D) represents individuals who are confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results
- Influence (I) represents individuals who place an emphasis on relationships, and influencing or persuading others
- Steadiness (S) represents individuals who are dependable, and place an emphasis on cooperation and sincerity
- Conscientiousness (C) represents individuals who place an emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency
These fields indicate how people communicate and receive information and what type of role they are likely to take on within a group. This provides a common language to understand how the employee operates within a team. Working with a growing team is an adjustment for both leaders and employees, and utilizing tools like this or others can help a large team sustain momentum and engagement.
3. Embrace Direct Conversations
As teams grow, ambiguity can derail productivity. Employees need clear feedback to understand what’s expected of them and how they’re performing.
Timely, specific feedback—both positive and constructive—helps employees adjust quickly and remain engaged. Ambiguity wastes time, but clarity empowers teams to move faster and deliver stronger results.
4. Create a Culture That Embraces Mistakes
Efficiency doesn’t mean perfection. For a growing team to remain nimble, employees must feel safe to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them.
Leaders play a critical role in shaping this culture. Normalize mistakes by sharing stories of how high performers in your organization have recovered and thrived after setbacks. Encourage employees to take accountability, fail fast and move forward with confidence.
At LaSalle Network, we’ve spent over two decades helping companies build and scale high-performing teams. Whether you’re looking to add talent or improve team dynamics, we can help. Get connected with us today.
