[HN Gopher] How Many People Can Someone Lead?
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How Many People Can Someone Lead?
Author : hihat
Score : 89 points
Date : 2021-09-12 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.patkua.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.patkua.com)
| mberning wrote:
| I 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.
| romanhn wrote:
| The article is generally reasonable, but it makes the common
| mistake of conflating leadership and management. This is
| specifically about directly managing a team. One can lead large
| groups of people (armies, departments) and huge projects spanning
| hundreds of people can be led by non-managers (I could also say
| individual contributors, but many folks also incorrectly assume
| this implies lack of leadership qualities/responsibilities).
| speedcoder wrote:
| When it comes to ballroom dance it gets down to how many want to
| follow and where you want to lead them:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A . And the rest isn't
| turtles all the way down, rather it's leadership in dance
| exemplifying leadership in other stuff.
| mdriley wrote:
| See also Rands, "Seven plus or minus three"
|
| https://randsinrepose.com/archives/seven-plus-or-minus-three...
| Wistar wrote:
| 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-holders and
| management; frequent conflict resolution; incredible time and
| resources management; quick adaption to unexpected situations;
| acute safety awareness; and to operate in a highly-political
| environment with severe budget constraints.
|
| She's a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a
| public school.
| krisrm wrote:
| 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.
| zaat wrote:
| 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.
| geofft wrote:
| 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.
| Wistar wrote:
| 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.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Can you let us know which public school system has 2-4
| assistants in a 24-person kindergarten classroom so I can
| move there when I have children?
| [deleted]
| deepdmistry wrote:
| Growing up we had 60 instead of 24 students and 0 assistants
| and still no violence and less if none bad conflicts
| analog31 wrote:
| Each assistant is typically assigned to a single special
| needs kid.
| anonexpat wrote:
| You missed the part where she's criminally underpaid for the
| work she does.
| leetrout wrote:
| But she gets her summers off! /s
|
| It's crazy how underpaid teachers are.
| marvin wrote:
| 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.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| In a lot of cases, they don't want to do the job. There
| are teacher shortages in a lot of the United States,
| especially in states that are infamous for mistreating
| teachers, like Texas.
| whartung wrote:
| 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-...
| wenc wrote:
| 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.
| martin_a wrote:
| > 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.
| drfrank wrote:
| 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 routed through
| the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is
| constrained within the scope of the "leader".
|
| These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because
| of the leader's limited focus and the departure of team members
| who feel constrained, the organization develops cracks and holes
| in responsibility and ability to act on opportunities.
|
| Managers who subscribe to this authoritarian model promote
| authoritarians, capable technical contributors who want more
| control over the part of the system they and their peers have
| been working in.
|
| The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open
| positions on their teams: They already have networks of former
| employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of
| the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions
| open up.
|
| But virtually all of the job postings you'll see publicly
| (especially for replacement positions or incremental growth) are
| described solely in terms of the project and the expected
| technical skill requirements rather than or in addition to the
| attributes that make a team more than a collection of extra
| appendages for a "leader". E.g. team values and non-values, the
| existing roles and expertise of the other team members and how
| the open position will complement those, the team's norms around
| work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc.
|
| I think that the average manager at a tech company is not a good
| manager, and that the larger the company the lower the average
| (smaller companies just fail with bad managers). But by far most
| open positions at any time are positions reporting to bad
| managers.
| marcinzm wrote:
| One interesting note is that some people actually _want_ an
| authoritarian leader because they don 't want responsibility or
| more things to think about. I was talking online about how much
| I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of
| "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I
| be doing their job."
|
| >The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for
| open positions on their teams: They already have networks of
| former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the
| employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon
| as positions open up.
|
| It's also fairly easy to tell from talking to a team if the
| manager is actually good or not. If many people don't accept
| offers to your team then you may want to do some soul
| searching.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I wonder if there's an underlying cause for that attitude. I
| could see, for example, people working in a culture of high
| accountability and low trust trying to push decision making
| uphill lest they become a scapegoat. Meanwhile, places with a
| better office culture might feel more comfortable exercising
| autonomy and might value individuals taking the initiative
| more.
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| What does "TFA" mean?
| eCa wrote:
| The Freaking Article, in other words, the linked article
| whose thread this is.
| chris_j wrote:
| 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.
| comprev wrote:
| The "Featured" Article
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Agreed. Managers are empowered by organization and position.
| Leaders are empowered by inspiring and creating followers. They
| are diametric opposites in terms of mechanism and direction of
| power. Followers GIVE the leader power. Managers impose by
| force of position and control of organization power/money/etc.
|
| The number of direct reports that function well as managed or
| led employees or any other organization hierarchy is about 5-7
| but at most 10-12. This is a biological, neurological and
| psychological limit. It's also related to information theory
| and the UI-limits of the brain. It's related to chunking but
| also related to other limits of cognition and the finite number
| of hours in a day intersected with the minimal required
| cognitive focus/attention required to guide or manage an
| employee.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| > This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot
| the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed
| through the "leader", individual growth and development and
| team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader".
|
| This isn't an absolute conclusion, I don't think. I can speak
| for my own organization -
|
| I lead 2 functionally-aligned teams, meaning they own internal
| product/systems for two different partner orgs. I also have a
| technical program management function which owns initiatives
| related to the above when they span more than a single team or
| are company-wide initiatives. I also have an engineering team
| with its own EM who roughly cover the scope of whatever my
| organization is doing - could be single-function, could be
| company-wide.
|
| In my model, decisions from Principal/Director/Manager team
| members don't wait on me. They can if they want extra eyes or
| extra air cover, but otherwise, my job these days is less about
| setting technical direction and more about unblocking via
| executive alignment, budget, people, etc.
|
| So far you might be thinking this is uninteresting and just
| means that my individual managers are the local despot, but
| I've done two things to (so far) eliminate that -
|
| 1. The TPM is responsible for getting us through the design
| stage, and they manage no one (or maybe other TPMs). This means
| they herd the cats and work with engineers and SMEs to get
| aligned on whatever design will make us functionally and
| technically successful.
|
| 2. This one is more on my qualities as a leader, but I also ask
| the managers on my team to err on the side of delegating more
| and letting their staff impress them, and being there as a
| resource when they need help. I think this is called servant
| leadership, but I don't read a lot of management stuff.
|
| Team composition (experience and horsepower) plays a large role
| in whether this model can be successful and how hands on you'll
| have to be, but in trying to distill a decade+ of experience
| into a couple of paragraphs, this is generally how I like to
| run things. YMMV of course, I don't hold myself out as an
| authority, just offering a counterpoint.
|
| > The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for
| open positions on their teams: They already have networks of
| former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the
| employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon
| as positions open up.
|
| If you adhere to the standard 1 year non-solicit, this isn't
| true right away. Hiring in my first year at a new company is
| one of the hardest parts of my job. But I'm probably a bit of a
| rule follower when it comes to the non-solicit - moreso than
| others, I've observed.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The distinction here is between Politician and Technician.
|
| At the DevLead level one is a technician - diving into the
| complexities and trade offs and making a decision that will
| meet constraints that are the end point of a political process
| the devlead probably was not a part of
|
| The politician you seem to be thinking of is someone (possibly
| the same someone) who is active in the political process that
| ends up deciding the constraints the technician works under -
| internal and external to the organisation
|
| So this will be some of email threads or chats amoung some or
| all other devleads, it will be "being helpful" answering
| requests, assigning resources or time to help other
| politicians, or worse architecture diagrams, or it will be
| speaking at conferences etc etc etc. In the lingo it's becoming
| an "Authority". But one is only an "Authority" by being
| accepted by a "constituency" - maybe "all the devs in the
| company who think we ought to start using git" is your
| leadership position (ok maybe that's a decade old now but it's
| an easy example). Betray the constituency and lose the
| leadership position.
|
| Neither are better than the other. Some political processes are
| better than others (in a democracy we perhaps appreciate this).
| Open decision making is likely to lead to long term better
| decisions - even if it is messy.
|
| Linus Torvalds is an obvious leader example - using one
| political process (this is what I think - essentially using
| email as Thomas Paine used pamphlets)
|
| But yeah - "managing" 5 people is reasonable - by the time you
| hit 12 it's a full time job listening to the moaning and they
| stop being a devlead. Only some can be a politican and a
| manager at same time.
| polskibus wrote:
| Could you please describe your ideal, non-authoritarian model
| for management and leadership?
| dagmx wrote:
| The 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 team
| as well.
|
| However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to
| both execute their work and stay on top of things.
|
| What I found helped was making sure that everyone on the team was
| made aware of everything going on (in summary of course) so that
| there was less need to act as the central knowledge store, which
| is quite common for a lot of leads to turn into.
| coldcode wrote:
| I usually tried to lead at most 5-6 people building apps from
| the 80's until this year when I retired. What you said is
| basically what I did as well, leading is not dictating, but you
| do need people who can work with the minimally necessary
| information and still do what's needed. Keeping people in the
| dark, insisting on everything be decided by you, giving them no
| room to thrive, is a guarantee of disaster.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "However what worked well there was that I could trust my team
| to both execute their work and stay on top of things."
|
| This is key. Do you have people you have to take by the hand
| and guide through every step, or do you have competent, capable
| ones, able to think for themself (who will get annoyed, if
| treated like childs).
|
| Reality is usually a mix and a valuable leadership skill is
| finding out early, who needs close supervision and who not.
| With very competent people, you can have a very flat hierachie.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| sharmin123 wrote:
| How Does A Hacker Hack A Phone? How To Avoid Phone Hacking?:
| https://www.hackerslist.co/how-does-a-hacker-hack-a-phone-ho...
| asdfge4drg wrote:
| Management and leadership are not the same thing. One person can
| lead millions of people through clear and emotional articulation
| of their vision.
| milofeynman wrote:
| I lead 4-5. I could lead more if I had the right tech leadership
| folks on the team. I agree with most everything from the article.
| Do you have people who can lead and mentor the other people on
| your team? Do you have people who can take technical leadership
| over projects? Is your team made up of all one discipline, like
| backend? Or made of of mobile and web and backend? How many
| junior devs are on the team?
|
| I've been on a team where one manager was over 10+ people and I
| felt neglected and I felt like the people who didn't pull their
| weight got away with it and that work was pushed off on me.
|
| All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I
| really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring
| manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The
| job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12
| people. Bullet dodged, maybe?
| marcinzm wrote:
| >All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place
| I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring
| manager wasn't interested because of that single data point.
| The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing
| 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe?
|
| Sounds like they wanted to scale the team in the future and the
| current manager isn't able to do that. Rather than demoting
| them they're bringing on another manager to take half the team.
| Eventually the new manager would grow their team enough to be
| promoted and the current manager would report to them. Messy
| but may be the least messy approach that keeps the current
| manager from leaving.
| Animats wrote:
| This is called "span of control", and it's a well-studied
| subject.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
| amelius wrote:
| How many people can someone micromanage?
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Question really seems to be 'how many people can someone _manage_
| ' not lead.
|
| You can lead far more people than you can manage.
| bbarn wrote:
| It depend on the person, and it depends on the job. The article
| does a lot of dancing around that obvious fact.
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