How many things can you manage?
The bee was raving yesterday about her new school and how it’s going to be for her managing 8 kids in her class and that the most she’ll ever have is 18. Once they get to over 18 in a form they split up the class.
A day later and once again I’m thinking about how something she does in school relates to business, specifically managing people. It makes me laugh when people judge success by how many people they manage, no one can give a large number of people the same attention that they could to a small number.
What’s the ideal number of people you can manage? I’m not sure, but as there are 5 days a week my guess is that no one should directly manage more then 4 people. There just isn’t enough time to really help, lead and develop more people – and still get on with your own job. So what happens when you hit four, have one of the team support and manage one of the others.
Of course this doesn’t work for every organisation and specific skill, perhaps it’s easier to manage more engineers then it is to manage analysts or whatever. But I think the overall principle holds, organisations need to have a cap on how many people report to other people, if not it opens the door for neglect.
