[jncfhnb]

Ok but I think this is still just bad.

If person A manages 6 things and thinks it is too much, he should instead manage 3 things and have a new person B manage the other 3. Not elevate himself to manage person B and C who each have 3 things.

You say your job is to emulate what they would do, but also that there’s a game of telephone going on. That implies your boss is still very much in the loop of those actively communicating, and what’s probably happening is you’re bubbling up lower and lower fidelity information up the chain for them to make decisions.

You should never have the role of trying to emulate what your boss would do. If you’re going to manage managers, then those managers below you should have some sort of functional/technical expertise that warrants them being independent managers or they should have enough autonomy that your relationship is only about allocating higher level resources to them.

[kbenson]

If you have 100 people at the company you should have 19 managers with about 5 people each? And then the CEO has to manage those 19 managers, and has 19 people under them (because what is a CEO other than the person managing what's done at the top level?)? What about when the company has 1000 people?

It's all fine to you should just split it up more, but that only makes sense if you look at the part of the system (company) in isolation, which you can't do. It's intricately linked to the parts around it.

What you're recommending isn't even the waterbed theory of complexity, where you push down complexity in one area and it pops up in another, this is the ostrich theory of complexity, where if you stick your head in the sand and ignore everything then it doesn't matter.

[jncfhnb]

Org structure should not be a function of number of heads. If you follow some logic that each manager should have n reports you’ll make an idiotically tall structure. It’s basically the stupidest thing you can do. Which many organizations do. Most large orgs have a terrible design. It’s difficult.

Effective org design is about properly delegating authority. If you need to get your boss’ permission to do things, you’re friction, not lube. If your job is synthesizing others’ synthesis, so that a real decision maker can do things; you’re friction. If you’re a manager whose sole job is to try and emulate someone who is a better manager in a higher position, you’re friction.

It’s more useful to directly oversee a smaller number of important useful things that you can handle well than to hire two new people and manage them managing others.

Managers of managers are useful at the junctions where one manager doesn’t have the skill set to manage a necessary sub function at a tactical level. A CTO, CFO, CHRO, etc. at the top. Maybe a tech team lead or a design team lead or a financial team lead (varying by if you’re organized by product or function).

When a “manager” is not responsible for any tactical decision making, and instead just broad strategic direction, it’s much easier to govern a wide team of independently effective members. But if it grows too much? SPLIT the manager of manager duties with someone else. Don’t create another layer of manager of manager of managers who then by necessity also need to get split anyway.

> What you're recommending isn't even the waterbed theory of complexity, where you push down complexity in one area and it pops up in another, this is the ostrich theory of complexity, where if you stick your head in the sand and ignore everything then it doesn't matter.

Fuck off with this bullshit nothing assertion.

[kbenson]

Congratulations, you've avoided providing any useful details about your suggestion again. I'll ask a different way. If your plan is to just add more managers in a single level above the bottom, how do you expect the CEO to deal with the hundreds of managers that would report directly to them, that they would need to relay the company direction to and get feedback from?

Very specifically, without a tree structure, how does this scale for those above this layer of hundreds of managers at the same level in your preferred solution presented here? Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?

[jncfhnb]

I’m not saying don’t use a tree structure. I’m saying only create vertical tree cuts at functional junctions were the type of work is different between boss and subordinate. Do not ever make vertical boss where your subordinates are just supposed to be shittier extensions of yourself. Only one person should be in charge of tactics. Only one person should be in charge of strategy.

Not every decision should roll up to the CEO. Not in terms of decision making (obviously) but honestly not even on the org chart.

If your job is assembling little PowerPoints to pitch decisions to your boss then you’re an impediment to getting things done. You should have the authority to do what you want without your boss’ approval.

This is the natural, shitty outcome when you made X and then made Y, and don’t have time to do both, so you think you should be promoted to manage a manager for X and Y each. No. Bad. That’s selfish prioritization and the cost of the org. You should pick one and do it well and accept that you do not have capacity to reap the rewards of both. When everybody plays the game, everyone loses. Prisoners dilemma of org design incentives.

> Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?

Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit

[kbenson]

> Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit

That wasn't meant to be passive aggressive, it was meant to solicit an answer to the specific question I was asking. I interpreted you point differently than what you apparently meant, either from a misunderstanding on my part, a poor explanation or your part, or some combination thereof.

I thought I was sufficiently clear a few replies back when asking how your solution scales to larger groups of people while I pointed out problems of scali g that I was looking for your thoughts on that, and then you proceeded to talk about entirely different things.

Honeatly, I'm aware my ostrich comment was a bit rude, and was trying to tone it down and honestly ask here. It's not that I think it's impossible or stupid that s along might hmbe ha fled a different way. "Flat" management strucutes claim to do so, and while I'm very sceptical of them in reality, I would love to hear from someone in the trenches about how they thought it worked or failed in practice, and so thought (along with interpreting your earlier comments as "extra levels are unneeded" instead of "they should provide different things") that you might actually go down that route and have a take on it.

For what it's worth, I don't think I actually disagree much with what you're advocating for, but I'm not sure it makes sense in the pure form you're describing in reality. It's great to want every level of.management to bring their own special bit to the picture, but sometimes when you have tens of thousands of employees, I think some levels will necessarily be present just to deal with the scale. Playing around with Dunbar's law and modern management studies means that for a large company you start getting quite a few management levels deep unless you expect people to be managing a hundred people under them each.

That in essence, is the main critique I have of what you've said and was trying to get you to address. Given a company of 20,000 people, explain how many levels of management you expect them to have and what special sauce each level could even theoretically bring and how many people on average each level would be directly responsible for managing. I suspect it will be hard to justify some levels other than the need to provide stable relationships between the people involved.

[jncfhnb]

You can have many vertical levels. It’s the role design that you want to solve for. The flattening is a side effect. Managers hiring more managers because they don’t have capacity to manage all of their subordinates is a cancer that grows. Do it two times and you now have three managers that all view themselves as managing the same individual contractor at different levels of specificity. And inevitably one guy in the middle becomes nothing but a gatekeeper for talking to the bigger boss. It’s countercultural but productive for people’s scope of work to go down every now and then.

The number of direct reports should scale with the level of tactical involvement. Call center employees -> huge team. Dev work -> small team.

Team of tech leads each running their own project and teams independently? Probably pretty darn big team. You can manage a lot of tech team leads so long as you do not go into the weeds.

As discussed elsewhere, the operational sides of the US military are a pretty good example of effective organization and delegation. This is in part because the critical real time, limited communication nature of military operations forcing the organization to adopt a structure that cuts out the wasteful managerial cruft you often see in the business world.

Russia operates its military more like a U.S. corporation and you can see how it fails them daily.