See also Rands, “Seven plus or minus three”
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/seven-plus-or-minus-three...
How Many People Can Someone Lead?
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#22My 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-holder…
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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#23The 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 tea…
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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#24>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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#25I 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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#26My 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-holder…
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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#27TFA 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…
What does "TFA" mean?
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#28My 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-holder…
You missed the part where she's criminally underpaid for the work she does.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#29My 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-holder…
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.
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.
Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?
#30My 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-holder…
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.
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