Honestly, it's kind of crazy to me that people throw numbers out there like "two direct reports is absurd". Management is not some arbitrary diagram on a wall t

Honestly, it's kind of crazy to me that people throw numbers out there like "two direct reports is absurd". Management is not some arbitrary diagram on a wall that we're trying to make look pretty! Management structure should reflect something about the underlying nature of the work being done. So yes, it can be perfectly reasonable to have 2 reports. Leading a project that needs about 3 people? You're the manager, and you have 2 direct reports. Managing a part of the organization where you've got 2 clearly distinct responsibilities beneath you? Promote a couple of your best employees to be team leads, manage them directly, everyone else reports to them and that opens up your time to do more strategic leadership focused on process, alignment with other parts of the business etc. You've done your succession planning, you've freed up your time to focus on more strategic issues, you've handled the personal development side of them job, and your structure is now set up so that if you want to grow the team you've got a clear way of doing it. Having these weird intuitions about how big a team should be over-ride creating the correct structure is just silly! The second you start just looking at the shape of the org chart rather than reasons behind its structure you've basically just given up on engaging with management at all. But a lot of the problems with management at these companies stem from exactly that - people focused on building org charts rather than focusing on what the business actually needs, which is why you end up with endless bureaucracy - because management structure doesn't actually map to the business being done.