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On average , in my experience as a manager for the last 20 years, you will lose about 8 hours per …

… On average , in my experience as a manager for the last 20 years, you will lose about 8 hours per month per staff member to "HR problems". It doesn't mean every staff member has these problems, but there will absolutely be those that have multiple repeated issues that take a long time to resolve. If your average work week has about 21 or 22 work days, you've just designed a full-time staff manager who does nothing else. Imagine performance review time in this structure where each review requires this staff manager to solicit performance input from each staff members task manager. I can tell you from personal experience it turns into a solid month of long nights and zero staff satisfied with their review. This kind of construct does exist in many companies, but most companies have decided that it's more efficient to have the staff manager and the task manager be the same person, even if they have to swallow the fact that it makes organizations less flat as that manager simply doesn't have the time to deal with so many people as direct reports. And voila, corporate hierarchy. …

Original discussionBayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’475 source comments · at import
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SI

Depends on if you are managing people or you are micromanaging people. It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class. 1 CEO -> 22 level A managers each level A manager -> 22 level B = 22 * 22 = 484 level B each level B manager -> 22 level C workers = 484 * 22 = 10648 workers. I have yet to see a company with 10_000 employees and only 2 levels of management between workers and the CEO. If you add another management layer, it is only 10 people per manager. This is not much and quickly gets into micromanagement if the manager works fulltime at managing.

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CE

Golden post. I'm a manager at a company that was mostly flat for most of its existence, but is starting to add management as we grow. Middle managers are evil and bad until you find out why you need them. Much better to bite the bullet and design a system with clear roles and good incentives past a certain head count.

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EI

I'm glad you called out Google in your post. I joined Google in 2015 having been a managing director of a global software engineering team at a non-tech F500, where I had teams in Brazil, India, China and Mexico, and folks scattered around the US & Scotland. I was accustomed for the prior ten years of my career, to run my org basically how you described, and I like to think I was a good manager that my team respected, and that we generally operated well. I spent a lot of my time 1) in leadership meetings trying to understand strategy and business requirements, and 2) structuring projects for my org and mentoring key individuals. At Google, I found there to be 0 respect for management as a function. Every manager is expected to have their own personal projects and come performance review season you had better be able to point to something you did yourself , not just the outcomes you manag…

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