22 is so many direct reports. If my supervisor had 22 direct reports. I'd just check out mentally because I know I wouldn't get any real face time with them to discuss issues. Skip manager attention? Forget it. With 22 direct reports, you're not there to add your expertise and make the process better, but to be a cog in the machine.

Maybe there is a cultural difference here.

I see repeated 1:1 sessions as micromanagement, like being treated as a kid that needs their hand held.

I don't want to discuss work items on 1:1 with the manager, I want to discuss them in a group setting because it is the group as a whole that solves the tasks. I also want the input from other members in the group instead of only the managers view.

In my country we do personal "how is everything going" 1:1 meetings at most once a year.

No, there isn't a cultural difference.

1. If you want to discuss work items in a group setting with 22 people, it's an inefficient use of time.

2. If a manager has 22 direct reports, it becomes nearly impossible for them to do anything but manage, which make the whole team less efficient.

3. A manager ought to be expected to, and have time to, mentor their employees. This is impractical with such large teams, and the manager will always end up preferring just a couple at the expense of the rest.

4. Micromanagement is inefficient and unappreciated, but in such a large & flat team, it's very hard to ensure streamlined horizontal communication such that optimal decisions can always be made by ICs (or above them, managers).

5. There are two reasons organizational layers exist. The first is to allow domain specific experts to focus on their specialties in areas of the business that required dedicated staffing. The second is so the organization is setup to continuously mature over time. If you have a completely flat org almost entirely composed of IC SMEs, attrition will end up killing you because of the disjointedness and lack of corporate tribal knowledge creation you miss when you don't have functional teams. Note that the second piece almost always introduces some functional inefficiency in the org, but it is a reasonable risk mitigation practice for most companies.

Personally, I think "how is everything going" should be discussed at least every month, and with more casual check-ins that are more frequent than that, and task-based. I have high expectations for managers, and do expect that a significant portion of their time should be spent helping the people beneath them learn & grow.

Actually 20 people is around a reasonable number if you have some tech/expertise leads in the mix. 2 to 4 tech leads would be more than enough. Tech leads would be responsible for the technical decisions under their respective area and course setting for the future work but they don't do people management.

Managers do not need to mentor. Actually an independent mentor is better as there would be no conflict of interest. A person can get a mentor from another team as long as both are willing. If there are more mentees seeking mentorship than mentors, you can rotate the mentors or double/triple assign them especially to those who seek to switch to management track. In reality though, there are more mentors than mentees it seems. At least that's my anecdotal observation.

20 people management is very well possible. You don't need to have 1:1 with directs every single week. If you do it bi-weekly (every two weeks), the meeting cost to the manager would be 2 sessions a day. Managers tend to join every single meeting under the sun. That's how they fill up their time and appear(!) to be busy. In reality, they can cut down the meetings down to %25 and nothing would change.

Let's look at lowest level managers. They can meet 20 directs bi-weekly for 0.5hr. Let's add 0.5hr follow up work after each 1:1, which is way generous. So that totals up to 20 x (0.5 + 0.5) / 2 = 10hr. Let's assume their own 1:1 with their own manager to take 1hr bi-weekly or 0.5hr weekly as they need to discuss both team and personal issues. They can meet with peers and their manager weekly for 2hr. They can meet with sub-teams (let's assume max 4 teams) weekly (4 x 1hr) for status and problems. And at the end of the scrum (bi-weekly), they can meet all the directs for demos and postmortem for 2hr. If there are some other technical meetings they do not need to attend unless they are absolutely needed but this shouldn't be often. Leads are perfectly capable of handling those and report back if they're hesitant, which, again, shouldn't happen often. Meeting tally up should be around 18hr. For a 40hr week that's less than half. Let's assume they're dragged into some technical meetings for 5 more hours that's still 23hr. Remaining time should be more than enough to sifting through emails, quarterly duties (e.g promos, end of quarter status, next quarter strategy/goal setting) and occasional emergencies.

For mid-level managers (generally directors), they don't have to meet with teams but we assumed their 1:1 would cost 0.5hr/week. Their follow-up should be much less though as they should be able to make decision on most of the issues on the spot. But let's add a quite generous %50 on top which would sum up to 0.5hr x 20 x 1.5 = 15hr. I think they should meet with tech leads (skip-level) too if they're one removed from the lowest level. They can meet them for 0.5hr every 8 weeks which should take at the very maximum, 20 x 4 (leads) / 8 * 0.5hr = 5hr/wk but it'll probably take less. Tally up is 24hr (if you add peer & direct meetings). Mid-level managers may get more randomized but they need to be efficient at what to get involved and what not to. Majority of the middle-managers make the mistake here. They get involved more than they can chew as they're micromanagers and/or they respond to every single demand from their own manager, practically doing the manager's job for them. This is because their promo is generally tied to their manager's attitude toward them but this should be changed. How you can change this is a separate topic I can get into, if needed but let's skip it for now.

For high level managers (generally VPs), their time would be spent less on skip-1:1s & technical meetings but more on strategy and status meetings. I believe they would have even more time at their hand than directors if they're vigilant on the time sunk on the emails.

Then you have CEO at the top or you can have SVPs if number of your ICs is above 16K. But, yes 20 people management is possible if managers are cognizant of their time and boundaries of their responsibilities and if they actually work instead of appear to be working.

But let's face it, it ain't happening because managers are A) either people who doesn't want to work anymore but need the money so they'll just carry on until they f-up big time and then switch companies and rinse & repeat, B) or, they overstep their boundaries, C) or, they don't know how to do prioritization and time management, D) or a combination of some/all above.

> I see repeated 1:1 sessions as micromanagement, like being treated as a kid that needs their hand held.

There's space between viewing employees as children needing to be coddled on the one side and viewing them as completely rational automatons on the other.

I worked for three years for a "flat" company where we were all expected to independently define our own goals, schedules, and get support when needed. When everything was going smoothly, it worked well—I had a degree of freedom that was an incredible relief after my previous employer. But when I lost sight of how I could best benefit the company, I went into a spiral that led to months of me questioning my ability to work in this field at all (or whether I was a capable adult at all). Without a reporting chain—or official support structure of any kind—I didn't know where to turn; and knowing that it was my responsibility to correct this mess made the spiral go even deeper when I failed to do so.

At the time I was fired from that job, I was having issues with my blood pressure for the first time in my life. Within months afterward, my blood pressure returned to a normal level, and my wellbeing improved in so many other ways that can't be so readily measured.

I'm fortunate to now be in an environment that both has formal support structures as well as informal communication and feedback loops. I'm still the ultimate person responsible for my success, but my manager (and others in the company) are also invested in it. Perhaps I have less autonomy than I did (I still have quite a bit, especially compared to other places I've worked), but I find myself much more relaxed. Guardrails can be freeing.

> Without a reporting chain—or official support structure of any kind—I didn't know where to turn

I really don't know where you are coming from. The OP stated a clear hierarchy where you'd have a single and well known manager that you can just go and talk to.

A manager with 22 direct reports isn't going to have the bandwidth to be available when each employee needs them (unless that's all they do).

Imagine every time a decision had to made where you were clearly the only person who needed to be met with and 20-50 people had to be plowed into a room to make that decision.

Instead of 2 person hours going into that effort, now we've just vaporized half a week to a week of person hours. A $300 decision just turned into at least a $3000 decision and the opportunity to handle 16x more point decisions just disappeared.

Even the idea of routinely scheduled 1:1s i dreadful.

People that do that one certainly will also do routine scheduled meetings by project, and routine scheduled meetings by department. You'll quickly get more than 10 hours/week of just those useless meetings, and your manager will be completely unavailable for any real work at any time.

22 is a reasonable class size for childhood schooling, and every single teacher ever has a clear and everpresent understanding of which kids "get it" or are gifted, and which kids are the problem. They are usually able to get face time with the kids that need it, and they do that to nearly entirely new kids every single year. Good teachers have a strong rapport with their students, and a tangible relationship with each and every one.

Why can't managers do what teachers do at a tenth the cost?

Like.... this isn't even the teaching part of teaching.

22 is a dreadfully huge class size and only "works" to the extent that we ignore all of the children that fall through the cracks. Teachers have nowhere near enough time to have personal time with the problem children that need it.

Children either excel, tread water, or fall behind. Children who fell behind once will most likely drop out of the school system entirely, unless it was for some very specific temporary reason, or their parents can afford private tutoring.

A school system that really wanted to make every child excel would probably need class sizes of 4-8, but that is well outside the realm of possibility.

Two reasons:

1. Large class sizes are only effective if the instructional method is rote memorization. Otherwise, the teacher ends of having all the same kinds of issues corporate managers have.

2. Teachers literally go through years of formal education on pedagogy and effective leadership. Most corporate managers adhere to the Dilbert Principle, where they had been a competent IC whose role grew too big for one person, so they were allowed to hire a helper... before they know it, they're managing a team, until they become too incompetent at the managing part.

Have you managed people? Just dealing with interpersonal issues alone of 22 people would take all your time. You would have little time after to convey direction or even learn about direction from those above you. This is why someone would make 2-3 of those 22 people managers/leads...

You're only talking about functional management though.

You also have to discuss 22 sets of career plans, interpersonal conflicts, hiring etc and all the other aggravation that comes with dealing with people.

I forgot where I read it, but a study years ago said something along the lines of 3-7 is the optimum number of direct reports someone can have.

True!

In firefighting (in Germany) we usually stick to no more than 8 people under direct control. That's an amount of people you can take care of.

Mashup of Dunbar's Number with "The Magical Number 7 Plus or Minus One"

Your model assumes the CEO and all others on the path are full time people managers. In reality, the upper layers of management have many other roles, from customer engagements to political lobbying to CSR to strategy etc. They can manage nowhere near 22 direct reports.

Additionally, geographic distribution is important. You can't have one manager in the USA managing 7 direct reports from Germany, 7 from India, and 8 from China. So, you need 1 site leader for each of these, that the 6-7 middle managers report to. These all add up very quickly to take the theoretical 2-3 minimum required layers to 6-8 layers in practice, without requiring any of those along the way to be micromanagers.

Middle management time breaks down like this:

- 40-60% trying to figure out how to turn large strategic goals into projects digestible by your staff

- 20-30% coordinating up to get permission and sync with senior management, and then coordinate workshare with your peers

- 20-30% coordinating with your staff

- 75% of your time then gets sunk into squishy people problem stuff most people would call "HR problems"

"But this adds up to over 100%!" - yup

When an HR problem arises, at least 8 hours will immediately vaporize out of your schedule. It's not uncommon for bad situations to turn into multiple days to resolve.

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.

There are certainly managers who deal with having so many direct reports by simply not allocating time to staff management issues (i.e. HR problems) or not dealing with them in a timely fashion. The result is usually chaos, high-turnover, blah blah, but the actual end result is that staff become fungible units as the organization has to plan around this effective unreliability.

Staff also have fewer career growth options as the divide between worker bees and management transition becomes an insurmountable gulf. New management staff then tend to be brought in from the outside, and don't know the business or products. Enshittification occurs because the only comprehensible strategy anybody can cling to is revenue growth.

Anecdotally, the places I've worked that were flat all featured these characteristics while well balanced hierarchies were able to grow, build long-term strategies, and had high-retention rates.

For the record, I've had as high as 20 direct reports where I was both staff and task manager and it was hell on everybody. I've also had as high as 75 reports in a well structured organization (no more than 5-7 people per manager) and it was totally fine. Companies were software, R&D, or some mix.

Note: the average Googler stays at Google for 1.3 years. In my current company the average employee stays for just under 5.

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 managed through your team. Perhaps this worked when it was a startup, but as an enterprise with roughly 350,000 workers, it's disrespectful to leaders to run things like this. I expect Bayer to experience similar disillusionment among their experienced management team. Overall they will probably see tactical acceleration in some areas but breakdowns in many others that will be more systemic and harder to recover from.

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.