5 ms·

Speaking as someone who has been a "middle manager": I've seen a trend where a company is trying to do WAY too much outside of their core competencies or too m

Speaking as someone who has been a "middle manager": I've seen a trend where a company is trying to do WAY too much outside of their core competencies or too many things at the same time. A strong temptation is to to just say "well, we will just hire a bunch of managers to oversee each project we are working on b/c having 17 direct reports who are front line employees is too many people." Then, times get tough and you think: "Well we can't fire X b/c they are the front line employee actually doing the work for Project Make Money so we'll just fire their manager. The manager manager will just have to deal with having 19 direct reports again"

onethought 3y ago
This scenario actually looks completely logical. Are you saying this is a stupid way to think or you agree?
- mongol 3y ago
  Having 17 direct reports is too much. Managers are not just a link in the chain of command. They also do stuff that needs to be taken care of. All kinds of unusal things happen and not all are suitable for delegation. 17 direct reports is not only a measure of how many colleagues they need to manage. It is also a measure of the large the weird-things-that-needs-taking-of-scope is.
  - myself248 3y ago
    Seriously. The most effective teams I've ever worked in, had 3-5 people under a manager. The manager occasionally got their hands dirty when they could spare the time, but in general, "getting every roadblock out of 5 people's way" is a lot of work, and combined with all the non-delegatable stuff, would keep them pretty busy. When a team grows much beyond that, the manager is no longer removing all the roadblocks. They're doing all that other stuff that _can't_ be delegated, and the team under them is now spending time doing stuff that _technically can be delegated_ but would be much more efficient for the manager to do. Typically what happens then, is one of the underlings becomes the de-facto also-manager, relieving the burden from the rest of the team and increasing overall productivity by re-centralizing certain duties. However, this hurts their individual productivity metrics, so in bean-counter companies this is a hazardous move. It's safer to not help the team and just let the sick structure shamble on.
    - baby 3y ago
      If the managers are also individual contributors then that makes sense
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Was thinking about this in mathematical terms recently, in terms of what's efficient vs. what can scale. In general, managers can't do things for reports that don't scale fairly across their whole team, because otherwise it'll give the appearance of favoritism for those reports who get favors and demotivate the rest. So to a first approximation, a manager with N reports can devote at most 1/N of their time to making a report's job easier. (To a second approximation, it's more like 1/2N because the manager also has overhead tasks like 1:1s and performance reviews that scale with the number of reports. To a third approximation the denominator scales supra-linearly after about 10 reports because you start taking up all your time with management tasks and have literally zero time for project work.) Their goal is to keep their report's time fully utilized, so it is logical for a manager to take on a task if it saves their report 2N as much time in IC work. For example, a manager with 4 reports can devote up to 10 hours/week fairly to each one; taking the second approximation, that's 5 hours of overhead and 5 hours of project work. The report has 40 hours/week of time. Therefore, it makes sense for the manager to do a one-hour task (say, design work) if it saves the report at least 8 hours of work. A manager with 10 reports can devote only 4 hours/week to each, so with 2 hours of overhead and 2 hours of project work, it makes sense to take on a one-hour task only if it saves the report 20 hours of work. Taking the third approximation and assuming overhead is a constant 2 hours/week/report, the first case becomes 8 hours of project work, and so a task makes sense if it saves the report 5 hours of work. You can see how a manager very rapidly approaches the "Do nothing other than bare minimum performance reviews, 1:1s, and save the report from blatant stupidity" line as their reporting load increases. This is why so much moderate stupidity and waste persists in big companies: the manager is not incentivized to remove it (and doesn't have time to anyway), but the report does not have the organizational power to change it. And ironically flatter hierarchies tend to be worse at this, unless they have ICs step up and do the "improve efficiency for everyone" role, but then they're usually either promoted into management or they leave. This is also why managers look chronically dumb and entitled to ICs. The IC can see plenty of opportunities where "If you just did X, which takes 15 minutes of your time, it would save me 2 hours of my time." They don't realize that their manager has 10 other reports, so a.) their manager does not have 15 minutes of time to spare and b.) their manager is only going to spend it if saves at least a day. Otherwise it makes more sense for the employee to do it themselves, simply from a scalability perspective.
- monkeydreams 3y ago
  I have 10 direct reports across 2 teams, with responsibility for a number of actual deliverable work pieces external to these staff. 10 direct reports is about half a week's work at a bare minimum without development, process improvement, etc. 20 is insane and would lead to skill atrophy and team dissatisfaction in short order.
  - baby 3y ago
    Why does managing the team takes so much work? Do you need to hold the hand of all your reports?
    - mertd 3y ago
      It depends on the nature of the work but technical work (which -like most people here- is I assume what we're talking about) requires a lot of time investment to truly understand and give meaningful feedback.
    - monkeydreams 3y ago
      My team have a very wide and complex domain of work; essentially we cover all of the domain of public health administration - patient management through to billing through to regulatory reporting, etc, etc. My team can be presenting formal advice for changes to statutory inpatient reporting one day, then troubleshooting a billing algorithm the next day, and then writing a FHIR parser the day after. In light of this I budget the following time for each of them: 1 hour a fortnight for general chat (what I refer to as temperature taking) to see where each of them are at in terms of morale, etc. 1/2 hour a fortnight for 1:1 catch-up covering administrative requirements (leave, review of metrics, etc, etc). 1 hour a fortnight (1/2 per week) for metric collection and review; are they having trouble with specific elements of their domain, are certain managers, stakeholders, customers, etc, holding things up. Their work tickets vary wildly in complexity and scope so this is the absolute minimum I can spend to know where each person is up to professionally speaking. 1 hour a fortnight for mentoring, training, etc. Generally speaking the more skilled staff will contact me more often to "pick my brain" regarding how to approach certain technical/personnal challenges, how to link data across our datasets, who to contact for advice on this or that regulatory or statutory requirement. And about half an hour per person, per fortnight reviewing their changes or service requests as I am primary CAB representative for my products - and these items are key outputs of the work they deliver. So, in essence, four hours per team member per fortnight. Very little hand-holding for such a widely dispersed team, and they remain engaged and focused on their tasks with minimum disruption.

onethought 3y ago

This scenario actually looks completely logical. Are you saying this is a stupid way to think or you agree?

mongol 3y ago
Having 17 direct reports is too much. Managers are not just a link in the chain of command. They also do stuff that needs to be taken care of. All kinds of unusal things happen and not all are suitable for delegation. 17 direct reports is not only a measure of how many colleagues they need to manage. It is also a measure of the large the weird-things-that-needs-taking-of-scope is.
- myself248 3y ago
  Seriously. The most effective teams I've ever worked in, had 3-5 people under a manager. The manager occasionally got their hands dirty when they could spare the time, but in general, "getting every roadblock out of 5 people's way" is a lot of work, and combined with all the non-delegatable stuff, would keep them pretty busy. When a team grows much beyond that, the manager is no longer removing all the roadblocks. They're doing all that other stuff that _can't_ be delegated, and the team under them is now spending time doing stuff that _technically can be delegated_ but would be much more efficient for the manager to do. Typically what happens then, is one of the underlings becomes the de-facto also-manager, relieving the burden from the rest of the team and increasing overall productivity by re-centralizing certain duties. However, this hurts their individual productivity metrics, so in bean-counter companies this is a hazardous move. It's safer to not help the team and just let the sick structure shamble on.
  - baby 3y ago
    If the managers are also individual contributors then that makes sense
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Was thinking about this in mathematical terms recently, in terms of what's efficient vs. what can scale. In general, managers can't do things for reports that don't scale fairly across their whole team, because otherwise it'll give the appearance of favoritism for those reports who get favors and demotivate the rest. So to a first approximation, a manager with N reports can devote at most 1/N of their time to making a report's job easier. (To a second approximation, it's more like 1/2N because the manager also has overhead tasks like 1:1s and performance reviews that scale with the number of reports. To a third approximation the denominator scales supra-linearly after about 10 reports because you start taking up all your time with management tasks and have literally zero time for project work.) Their goal is to keep their report's time fully utilized, so it is logical for a manager to take on a task if it saves their report 2N as much time in IC work. For example, a manager with 4 reports can devote up to 10 hours/week fairly to each one; taking the second approximation, that's 5 hours of overhead and 5 hours of project work. The report has 40 hours/week of time. Therefore, it makes sense for the manager to do a one-hour task (say, design work) if it saves the report at least 8 hours of work. A manager with 10 reports can devote only 4 hours/week to each, so with 2 hours of overhead and 2 hours of project work, it makes sense to take on a one-hour task only if it saves the report 20 hours of work. Taking the third approximation and assuming overhead is a constant 2 hours/week/report, the first case becomes 8 hours of project work, and so a task makes sense if it saves the report 5 hours of work. You can see how a manager very rapidly approaches the "Do nothing other than bare minimum performance reviews, 1:1s, and save the report from blatant stupidity" line as their reporting load increases. This is why so much moderate stupidity and waste persists in big companies: the manager is not incentivized to remove it (and doesn't have time to anyway), but the report does not have the organizational power to change it. And ironically flatter hierarchies tend to be worse at this, unless they have ICs step up and do the "improve efficiency for everyone" role, but then they're usually either promoted into management or they leave. This is also why managers look chronically dumb and entitled to ICs. The IC can see plenty of opportunities where "If you just did X, which takes 15 minutes of your time, it would save me 2 hours of my time." They don't realize that their manager has 10 other reports, so a.) their manager does not have 15 minutes of time to spare and b.) their manager is only going to spend it if saves at least a day. Otherwise it makes more sense for the employee to do it themselves, simply from a scalability perspective.
monkeydreams 3y ago
I have 10 direct reports across 2 teams, with responsibility for a number of actual deliverable work pieces external to these staff. 10 direct reports is about half a week's work at a bare minimum without development, process improvement, etc. 20 is insane and would lead to skill atrophy and team dissatisfaction in short order.
- baby 3y ago
  Why does managing the team takes so much work? Do you need to hold the hand of all your reports?
  - mertd 3y ago
    It depends on the nature of the work but technical work (which -like most people here- is I assume what we're talking about) requires a lot of time investment to truly understand and give meaningful feedback.
  - monkeydreams 3y ago
    My team have a very wide and complex domain of work; essentially we cover all of the domain of public health administration - patient management through to billing through to regulatory reporting, etc, etc. My team can be presenting formal advice for changes to statutory inpatient reporting one day, then troubleshooting a billing algorithm the next day, and then writing a FHIR parser the day after. In light of this I budget the following time for each of them: 1 hour a fortnight for general chat (what I refer to as temperature taking) to see where each of them are at in terms of morale, etc. 1/2 hour a fortnight for 1:1 catch-up covering administrative requirements (leave, review of metrics, etc, etc). 1 hour a fortnight (1/2 per week) for metric collection and review; are they having trouble with specific elements of their domain, are certain managers, stakeholders, customers, etc, holding things up. Their work tickets vary wildly in complexity and scope so this is the absolute minimum I can spend to know where each person is up to professionally speaking. 1 hour a fortnight for mentoring, training, etc. Generally speaking the more skilled staff will contact me more often to "pick my brain" regarding how to approach certain technical/personnal challenges, how to link data across our datasets, who to contact for advice on this or that regulatory or statutory requirement. And about half an hour per person, per fortnight reviewing their changes or service requests as I am primary CAB representative for my products - and these items are key outputs of the work they deliver. So, in essence, four hours per team member per fortnight. Very little hand-holding for such a widely dispersed team, and they remain engaged and focused on their tasks with minimum disruption.