10 ms·

How Many People Can Someone Lead?

144 points by hihat 5y ago

sharmin123 5y ago
How Does A Hacker Hack A Phone? How To Avoid Phone Hacking?: https://www.hackerslist.co/how-does-a-hacker-hack-a-phone-how-to-avoid-phone-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-does-a-hacker-hack-a-phone-ho...
dagmx 5y ago
The article touches on it a bit, but I think it also highly depends on the person. Some people are really good at leading large teams, others are better suited to smaller teams. It really also depends on the makeup of the team and how much you can trust them to execute without you intervening. I've lead teams of ~20 without issue as a first time lead. It went very well, both for me, and based on feedback, for the team as well. However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things. What I found helped was making sure that everyone on the team was made aware of everything going on (in summary of course) so that there was less need to act as the central knowledge store, which is quite common for a lot of leads to turn into.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things." This is key. Do you have people you have to take by the hand and guide through every step, or do you have competent, capable ones, able to think for themself (who will get annoyed, if treated like childs). Reality is usually a mix and a valuable leadership skill is finding out early, who needs close supervision and who not. With very competent people, you can have a very flat hierachie.
- vidarh 5y ago
  My experience is that this works fine as long as you 1) have a very well functioning HR team, and 2) nothing inter-personal goes wrong, 3) you have others taking on de facto leadership even if they're not formally in charge (you hint at this when you say you could trust your team to execute and stay on top of things). But what I've repeatedly seen is that the moment you have conflict, if you don't have a manager per ~4-10 people, you're screwed unless there's a lot of organisational support pulverising the people management over extra people. Because suddenly a manager is spending half their time untangling some conflict and still need to have bandwidth to do all the other things they were doing. As such I always look on teams with more direct reports than ~5-8 or so with deep suspicion. They may work well now, but they're often one crisis away from total meltdown. They're also often an indication of dysfunctional organisational leadership, who fails at promoting people to distribute responsibility.
- coldcode 5y ago
  I usually tried to lead at most 5-6 people building apps from the 80's until this year when I retired. What you said is basically what I did as well, leading is not dictating, but you do need people who can work with the minimally necessary information and still do what's needed. Keeping people in the dark, insisting on everything be decided by you, giving them no room to thrive, is a guarantee of disaster.
romanhn 5y ago
The article is generally reasonable, but it makes the common mistake of conflating leadership and management. This is specifically about directly managing a team. One can lead large groups of people (armies, departments) and huge projects spanning hundreds of people can be led by non-managers (I could also say individual contributors, but many folks also incorrectly assume this implies lack of leadership qualities/responsibilities).
drfrank 5y ago
TFA implicitly conflates "leadership" and "management", suggesting that the author is oblivious to the distinction. Even when the author describes dividing the responsibilities of "leadership" among multiple people, they describe dividing both leadership and management responsibilities between those people. This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader". These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because of the leader's limited focus and the departure of team members who feel constrained, the organization develops cracks and holes in responsibility and ability to act on opportunities. Managers who subscribe to this authoritarian model promote authoritarians, capable technical contributors who want more control over the part of the system they and their peers have been working in. The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up. But virtually all of the job postings you'll see publicly (especially for replacement positions or incremental growth) are described solely in terms of the project and the expected technical skill requirements rather than or in addition to the attributes that make a team more than a collection of extra appendages for a "leader". E.g. team values and non-values, the existing roles and expertise of the other team members and how the open position will complement those, the team's norms around work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc. I think that the average manager at a tech company is not a good manager, and that the larger the company the lower the average (smaller companies just fail with bad managers). But by far most open positions at any time are positions reporting to bad managers.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  One interesting note is that some people actually want an authoritarian leader because they don't want responsibility or more things to think about. I was talking online about how much I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I be doing their job." >The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up. It's also fairly easy to tell from talking to a team if the manager is actually good or not. If many people don't accept offers to your team then you may want to do some soul searching.
milofeynman 5y ago
I lead 4-5. I could lead more if I had the right tech leadership folks on the team. I agree with most everything from the article. Do you have people who can lead and mentor the other people on your team? Do you have people who can take technical leadership over projects? Is your team made up of all one discipline, like backend? Or made of of mobile and web and backend? How many junior devs are on the team? I've been on a team where one manager was over 10+ people and I felt neglected and I felt like the people who didn't pull their weight got away with it and that work was pushed off on me. All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe?
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe? Sounds like they wanted to scale the team in the future and the current manager isn't able to do that. Rather than demoting them they're bringing on another manager to take half the team. Eventually the new manager would grow their team enough to be promoted and the current manager would report to them. Messy but may be the least messy approach that keeps the current manager from leaving.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Question really seems to be ‘how many people can someone manage’ not lead. You can lead far more people than you can manage.
Animats 5y ago
This is called "span of control", and it's a well-studied subject.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
speedcoder 5y ago
When it comes to ballroom dance it gets down to how many want to follow and where you want to lead them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A . And the rest isn't turtles all the way down, rather it's leadership in dance exemplifying leadership in other stuff.
bbarn 5y ago
It depend on the person, and it depends on the job. The article does a lot of dancing around that obvious fact.
amelius 5y ago
How many people can someone micromanage?
Wistar 5y ago
My spouse both leads and manages ~24 direct reports, each of which require near continuous instruction, supervision, mentoring and encouragement. Her role demands an advanced degree with on-going education and certification requirements; exhaustive planning; an endless well of optimism; extensive individualized communication with third-party stake-holders; detailed performance accounting and reporting to stake-holders and management; frequent conflict resolution; incredible time and resources management; quick adaption to unexpected situations; acute safety awareness; and to operate in a highly-political environment with severe budget constraints. She's a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a public school.
- krisrm 5y ago
  This gave me a laugh. Very well written. And, good on your spouse for doing what she does. I was fortunate to have an excellent kindergarten teacher, and still think of her from time to time.
- zaat 5y ago
  Well, it is very common in situations like this to have 2 to 4 assistants, and I can't believe without them it would be possible to avoid hard conflicts and even violence on regular basis.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    She has no assistants and never has (I just asked her). Occasionally a student teacher but not for years, now. Some students, such as ESL or special ed, are pulled out of class for about 30 minutes from 2–4 times a week but, the recent district policy is called "push in" where the specialist comes in to class to assist a particular student or two.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deepdmistry 5y ago
    Growing up we had 60 instead of 24 students and 0 assistants and still no violence and less if none bad conflicts
whartung 5y ago
I'd heard this anecdotally in the past, apparently there's some meat to it. The Marines have this number set to 3. Marines obviously have different scenarios they have to deal with than most organizations. But it's still an interesting idea. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/the-us-marine-corps-uses-rule-of-3-to-organize-almost-everything-heres-how-learning-it-21-years-ago-changed-my-life.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/the-us-marine-corps-uses-...
- martin_a 5y ago
  > The Marines have this number set to 3. For firefighters in Germany this is, more or less, defined to be 5. A group (which is one of the pre-defined tactial units) consists of 9 people: The leader, three troops of two, one machinist, one "Melder" (kind of the guy/girl for "special tasks", helping with whatever is necessary). The leader commands the troop leaders, machinist and "Melder". This is expected and taught as the amount of people you can actively manage and take care of in stressful situations like deployments. edit: for larger deployments you'll have platoon leaders which will command a number of group leaders. for even larger deployments there'll be another layer of command so each platoon leader will only have to lead a set number of group leaders, too.
  - throw1234651234 5y ago
    This is going to be true of more professional military specialists as well. A Special Forces team will have an officer leading 4 sergeants - med, comms, weapons, and construction(/destruction). This is more of an exception rather than the rule though. I don't see how people are supposed to reasonably manage 10+ reports. At that point they are just a figurehead.
    - martin_a 5y ago
      > I don't see how people are supposed to reasonably manage 10+ reports. True! I'm leading 5 people at work and I find that enough most of the time, as I still have projects that I'm actively working on, too. If there are more people to come, I'll ask to integrate some kind of "team lead" for some of them, before all the work I do is micromanage and respond to mails.
mdriley 5y ago
See also Rands, “Seven plus or minus three” https://randsinrepose.com/archives/seven-plus-or-minus-three/ https://randsinrepose.com/archives/seven-plus-or-minus-three...
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
>How many people can someone lead? The average person? I'd say 0. Can it be taught outside of a highly organized situation? I'd say no. Can it be taught from a book? I'd say no.
mberning 5y ago
I would say more important than the experience of the team is their ability to work in a self directed fashion. I have had interns that work very well on their own, and I have had 20+ year veterans that need regular hand holding.
asdfge4drg 5y ago
Management and leadership are not the same thing. One person can lead millions of people through clear and emotional articulation of their vision.
dariusj18 5y ago
So, a single person can lead 3-4 people, but three people can lead 7-10. Sounds like those three people should each lead 3-4 people instead.
- fctorial 5y ago
  That's probably 1 tech lead managing two people each of which manages 3-4 people below him.
lmilcin 5y ago
Any number of people. Probably the author meant "supervise". There is fundamental difference between leadership and management and it is pretty poor performance on author's part to write about leadership and management and not realize this.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  With titles like “team leader” there is some ambiguity. It’s like the hacker = break into systems vs. tinkerer debate
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    Then the title should be something like "How many people a team leader can be in charge of?" It is fault of the author to give a misleading title, not mine as a reader to pick on it.
twobitshifter 5y ago
If you work in a matrix organization you’ll work on many projects which have have many managers and as a manager you’ll manage multiple projects involving much more than 4 or 5 people. TFA seemed to be getting at this with multiple managers but didn’t take it all the way through. Matrix management is not a panacea but it does help productivity by making sure that there is almost always some progress happening and that nobody is sitting still.
munk-a 5y ago
The number of people someone can lead is strictly based on their leadership score. For instance, as a 12th level wizard with a charisma modifier of +3 I can lead 23+1 people.
starky 5y ago
I found it interesting that the author was making a case for 2-3 people for someone inexperienced. I've seen people claim that you need to give someone new to leadership a team of 4-5 people because it is so easy to drop into micro-managing if you only have a couple reports. I took on a lead role earlier this year and unless the 3 people on the team were all inexperienced or I had enough other things to work on, I don't think it would be enough. I do feel like my balance of attention is better with a couple more relatively autonomous people involved.
pjlegato 5y ago
Admiral Hyman Rickover -- one of the most successful engineering managers in history -- had about 40 direct reports: https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm > "Some management experts advocate strict limits to the number of people reporting to a common superior—generally five to seven. But if one has capable people who require but a few moments of his time during the day, there is no reason to set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key people report frequently and directly to me. This enables me to keep up with what is going on and makes it possible for them to get fast action. The latter aspect is particularly important. Capable people will not work for long where they cannot get prompt decisions and actions from their superior."

144 points by hihat 5y ago

How Does A Hacker Hack A Phone? How To Avoid Phone Hacking?: https://www.hackerslist.co/how-does-a-hacker-hack-a-phone-how-to-avoid-phone-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-does-a-hacker-hack-a-phone-ho...

dagmx 5y ago

The article touches on it a bit, but I think it also highly depends on the person. Some people are really good at leading large teams, others are better suited to smaller teams. It really also depends on the makeup of the team and how much you can trust them to execute without you intervening. I've lead teams of ~20 without issue as a first time lead. It went very well, both for me, and based on feedback, for the team as well. However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things. What I found helped was making sure that everyone on the team was made aware of everything going on (in summary of course) so that there was less need to act as the central knowledge store, which is quite common for a lot of leads to turn into.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things." This is key. Do you have people you have to take by the hand and guide through every step, or do you have competent, capable ones, able to think for themself (who will get annoyed, if treated like childs). Reality is usually a mix and a valuable leadership skill is finding out early, who needs close supervision and who not. With very competent people, you can have a very flat hierachie.
vidarh 5y ago
My experience is that this works fine as long as you 1) have a very well functioning HR team, and 2) nothing inter-personal goes wrong, 3) you have others taking on de facto leadership even if they're not formally in charge (you hint at this when you say you could trust your team to execute and stay on top of things). But what I've repeatedly seen is that the moment you have conflict, if you don't have a manager per ~4-10 people, you're screwed unless there's a lot of organisational support pulverising the people management over extra people. Because suddenly a manager is spending half their time untangling some conflict and still need to have bandwidth to do all the other things they were doing. As such I always look on teams with more direct reports than ~5-8 or so with deep suspicion. They may work well now, but they're often one crisis away from total meltdown. They're also often an indication of dysfunctional organisational leadership, who fails at promoting people to distribute responsibility.
coldcode 5y ago
I usually tried to lead at most 5-6 people building apps from the 80's until this year when I retired. What you said is basically what I did as well, leading is not dictating, but you do need people who can work with the minimally necessary information and still do what's needed. Keeping people in the dark, insisting on everything be decided by you, giving them no room to thrive, is a guarantee of disaster.

romanhn 5y ago

The article is generally reasonable, but it makes the common mistake of conflating leadership and management. This is specifically about directly managing a team. One can lead large groups of people (armies, departments) and huge projects spanning hundreds of people can be led by non-managers (I could also say individual contributors, but many folks also incorrectly assume this implies lack of leadership qualities/responsibilities).

drfrank 5y ago

TFA implicitly conflates "leadership" and "management", suggesting that the author is oblivious to the distinction. Even when the author describes dividing the responsibilities of "leadership" among multiple people, they describe dividing both leadership and management responsibilities between those people. This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader". These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because of the leader's limited focus and the departure of team members who feel constrained, the organization develops cracks and holes in responsibility and ability to act on opportunities. Managers who subscribe to this authoritarian model promote authoritarians, capable technical contributors who want more control over the part of the system they and their peers have been working in. The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up. But virtually all of the job postings you'll see publicly (especially for replacement positions or incremental growth) are described solely in terms of the project and the expected technical skill requirements rather than or in addition to the attributes that make a team more than a collection of extra appendages for a "leader". E.g. team values and non-values, the existing roles and expertise of the other team members and how the open position will complement those, the team's norms around work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc. I think that the average manager at a tech company is not a good manager, and that the larger the company the lower the average (smaller companies just fail with bad managers). But by far most open positions at any time are positions reporting to bad managers.

marcinzm 5y ago
One interesting note is that some people actually want an authoritarian leader because they don't want responsibility or more things to think about. I was talking online about how much I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I be doing their job." >The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up. It's also fairly easy to tell from talking to a team if the manager is actually good or not. If many people don't accept offers to your team then you may want to do some soul searching.

milofeynman 5y ago

I lead 4-5. I could lead more if I had the right tech leadership folks on the team. I agree with most everything from the article. Do you have people who can lead and mentor the other people on your team? Do you have people who can take technical leadership over projects? Is your team made up of all one discipline, like backend? Or made of of mobile and web and backend? How many junior devs are on the team? I've been on a team where one manager was over 10+ people and I felt neglected and I felt like the people who didn't pull their weight got away with it and that work was pushed off on me. All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe?

marcinzm 5y ago
>All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe? Sounds like they wanted to scale the team in the future and the current manager isn't able to do that. Rather than demoting them they're bringing on another manager to take half the team. Eventually the new manager would grow their team enough to be promoted and the current manager would report to them. Messy but may be the least messy approach that keeps the current manager from leaving.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Question really seems to be ‘how many people can someone manage’ not lead. You can lead far more people than you can manage.

Animats 5y ago

This is called "span of control", and it's a well-studied subject.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

speedcoder 5y ago

When it comes to ballroom dance it gets down to how many want to follow and where you want to lead them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A . And the rest isn't turtles all the way down, rather it's leadership in dance exemplifying leadership in other stuff.

bbarn 5y ago

It depend on the person, and it depends on the job. The article does a lot of dancing around that obvious fact.

amelius 5y ago

How many people can someone micromanage?

Wistar 5y ago

My spouse both leads and manages ~24 direct reports, each of which require near continuous instruction, supervision, mentoring and encouragement. Her role demands an advanced degree with on-going education and certification requirements; exhaustive planning; an endless well of optimism; extensive individualized communication with third-party stake-holders; detailed performance accounting and reporting to stake-holders and management; frequent conflict resolution; incredible time and resources management; quick adaption to unexpected situations; acute safety awareness; and to operate in a highly-political environment with severe budget constraints. She's a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a public school.

krisrm 5y ago
This gave me a laugh. Very well written. And, good on your spouse for doing what she does. I was fortunate to have an excellent kindergarten teacher, and still think of her from time to time.
zaat 5y ago
Well, it is very common in situations like this to have 2 to 4 assistants, and I can't believe without them it would be possible to avoid hard conflicts and even violence on regular basis.
- Wistar 5y ago
  She has no assistants and never has (I just asked her). Occasionally a student teacher but not for years, now. Some students, such as ESL or special ed, are pulled out of class for about 30 minutes from 2–4 times a week but, the recent district policy is called "push in" where the specialist comes in to class to assist a particular student or two.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deepdmistry 5y ago
  Growing up we had 60 instead of 24 students and 0 assistants and still no violence and less if none bad conflicts

whartung 5y ago

I'd heard this anecdotally in the past, apparently there's some meat to it. The Marines have this number set to 3. Marines obviously have different scenarios they have to deal with than most organizations. But it's still an interesting idea. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/the-us-marine-corps-uses-rule-of-3-to-organize-almost-everything-heres-how-learning-it-21-years-ago-changed-my-life.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/the-us-marine-corps-uses-...

martin_a 5y ago
> The Marines have this number set to 3. For firefighters in Germany this is, more or less, defined to be 5. A group (which is one of the pre-defined tactial units) consists of 9 people: The leader, three troops of two, one machinist, one "Melder" (kind of the guy/girl for "special tasks", helping with whatever is necessary). The leader commands the troop leaders, machinist and "Melder". This is expected and taught as the amount of people you can actively manage and take care of in stressful situations like deployments. edit: for larger deployments you'll have platoon leaders which will command a number of group leaders. for even larger deployments there'll be another layer of command so each platoon leader will only have to lead a set number of group leaders, too.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  This is going to be true of more professional military specialists as well. A Special Forces team will have an officer leading 4 sergeants - med, comms, weapons, and construction(/destruction). This is more of an exception rather than the rule though. I don't see how people are supposed to reasonably manage 10+ reports. At that point they are just a figurehead.
  - martin_a 5y ago
    > I don't see how people are supposed to reasonably manage 10+ reports. True! I'm leading 5 people at work and I find that enough most of the time, as I still have projects that I'm actively working on, too. If there are more people to come, I'll ask to integrate some kind of "team lead" for some of them, before all the work I do is micromanage and respond to mails.

mdriley 5y ago

See also Rands, “Seven plus or minus three” https://randsinrepose.com/archives/seven-plus-or-minus-three/ https://randsinrepose.com/archives/seven-plus-or-minus-three...

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

>How many people can someone lead? The average person? I'd say 0. Can it be taught outside of a highly organized situation? I'd say no. Can it be taught from a book? I'd say no.

mberning 5y ago

I would say more important than the experience of the team is their ability to work in a self directed fashion. I have had interns that work very well on their own, and I have had 20+ year veterans that need regular hand holding.

asdfge4drg 5y ago

Management and leadership are not the same thing. One person can lead millions of people through clear and emotional articulation of their vision.

dariusj18 5y ago

So, a single person can lead 3-4 people, but three people can lead 7-10. Sounds like those three people should each lead 3-4 people instead.

fctorial 5y ago
That's probably 1 tech lead managing two people each of which manages 3-4 people below him.

lmilcin 5y ago

Any number of people. Probably the author meant "supervise". There is fundamental difference between leadership and management and it is pretty poor performance on author's part to write about leadership and management and not realize this.

quickthrower2 5y ago
With titles like “team leader” there is some ambiguity. It’s like the hacker = break into systems vs. tinkerer debate
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Then the title should be something like "How many people a team leader can be in charge of?" It is fault of the author to give a misleading title, not mine as a reader to pick on it.

twobitshifter 5y ago

If you work in a matrix organization you’ll work on many projects which have have many managers and as a manager you’ll manage multiple projects involving much more than 4 or 5 people. TFA seemed to be getting at this with multiple managers but didn’t take it all the way through. Matrix management is not a panacea but it does help productivity by making sure that there is almost always some progress happening and that nobody is sitting still.

munk-a 5y ago

The number of people someone can lead is strictly based on their leadership score. For instance, as a 12th level wizard with a charisma modifier of +3 I can lead 23+1 people.

starky 5y ago

I found it interesting that the author was making a case for 2-3 people for someone inexperienced. I've seen people claim that you need to give someone new to leadership a team of 4-5 people because it is so easy to drop into micro-managing if you only have a couple reports. I took on a lead role earlier this year and unless the 3 people on the team were all inexperienced or I had enough other things to work on, I don't think it would be enough. I do feel like my balance of attention is better with a couple more relatively autonomous people involved.

pjlegato 5y ago

Admiral Hyman Rickover -- one of the most successful engineering managers in history -- had about 40 direct reports: https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm > "Some management experts advocate strict limits to the number of people reporting to a common superior—generally five to seven. But if one has capable people who require but a few moments of his time during the day, there is no reason to set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key people report frequently and directly to me. This enables me to keep up with what is going on and makes it possible for them to get fast action. The latter aspect is particularly important. Capable people will not work for long where they cannot get prompt decisions and actions from their superior."