How Many People Can Someone Lead?
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How Many People Can Someone Lead?
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Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
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Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#3The 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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#4The 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).
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#5TFA 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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#6I 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?
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#7Question really seems to be ‘how many people can someone manage’ not lead.
You can lead far more people than you can manage.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#8TFA 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…
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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#9TFA 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…
Agreed. Managers are empowered by organization and position. Leaders are empowered by inspiring and creating followers. They are diametric opposites in terms of mechanism and direction of power. Followers GIVE the leader power. Managers impose by force of position and control of organization power/money/etc.
The number of direct reports that function well as managed or led employees or any other organization hierarchy is about 5-7 but at most 10-12. This is a biological, neurological and psychological limit. It's also related to information theory and the UI-limits of the brain. It's related to chunking but also related to other limits of cognition and the finite number of hours in a day intersected with the minimal required cognitive focus/attention required to guide or manage an employee.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#10This is called "span of control", and it's a well-studied subject.[1]