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How Many People Can Someone Lead?

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Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#31

Post by martin_a »

whartung wrote: post #19

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-...

> 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.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#32

Post by deepdmistry »

zaat wrote: post #26
Wistar wrote: post #18

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-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.

Growing up we had 60 instead of 24 students and 0 assistants and still no violence and less if none bad conflicts

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#33

Post by leetrout »

anonexpat wrote: post #28
Wistar wrote: post #18

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-holder…

You missed the part where she's criminally underpaid for the work she does.

But she gets her summers off! /s

It's crazy how underpaid teachers are.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#34

Post by marvin »

leetrout wrote: post #33
anonexpat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the part where she's criminally underpaid for the work she does.

But she gets her summers off! /s It's crazy how underpaid teachers are.

It's a wonder anyone wants to do the job at all, knowing all this in advance. I almost became a teacher once. Figured all the abuse would be a degrading waste of my efforts.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#35

Post by eCa »

wojcikstefan wrote: post #27
drfrank wrote: post #5

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…

What does "TFA" mean?

The Freaking Article, in other words, the linked article whose thread this is.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#36

Post by chris_j »

wojcikstefan wrote: post #27
drfrank wrote: post #5

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…

What does "TFA" mean?

The f**ing article. A piece of internet slang that goes back many years, possibly originating on Slashdot and referring to the article that we're discussing here.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#37

Post by analog31 »

zaat wrote: post #26
Wistar wrote: post #18

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-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.

Each assistant is typically assigned to a single special needs kid.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#38

Post by wenc »

whartung wrote: post #19

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-...

That's fascinating. 3 seems like a good average number.

I think there are minimums too. It depends on whether your reports are experienced or not. If they're experienced, any number is fine. However, if they're inexperienced (i.e. interns, or fresh out of college), you really need to manage 2 or more. 1 is weirdly a bad number.

Managing a single inexperienced direct report is truly challenging and suboptimal, both for the manager and the report. Having no peers to calibrate themselves to, the report feels insecure and is either too eager to please or becomes overly dependent. It's hard for the manager to know how to manage too -- you want to avoid micromanaging but everything you do is going to carry undue emotional weight on the report because they have no other reference points because they have no peers. If I had to do it again, I'd rather have at least 2 direct reports or none at all. 1 is just not good.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#39

Post by geofft »

zaat wrote: post #26
Wistar wrote: post #18

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-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.

Where are you basing this on? In public schools in the US (at least in my hometown in Louisiana), schoolteachers don't get assistants of any sort. You get the occasional "student teacher," who is training to become a schoolteacher, but never more than one.

Faculty at colleges get teaching assistants, but their job is hardly to help with conflicts or prevent violence, their job is to help with instruction, grading, writing homework assignments, etc. When I was a teaching assistant, I myself tended to have 10-20 students in my section, and the class as a whole had close to a hundred people.

Re: How Many People Can Someone Lead?

#40

Post by comprev »

wojcikstefan wrote: post #27
drfrank wrote: post #5

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…

What does "TFA" mean?

The "Featured" Article
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