Recognizing the Breaking Points of Management Structure

I'd be willing to wager that tighter or more hierarchical management structures are correlated with lower levels of engagement for the employees at the bottom. In other words- there are two ways to get people to cooperate: to use secrecy and threats as a lever, or to have a common myth or vision that everyone believes in. Increasing secrecy and mistrust might be a signal that the common vision has deteriorated. Of course it depends on the size of the organization too. I'd like to see a study confirming or disproving that idea.

&quot;When startups approach those employee counts, communication within the company breaks down and the startup can’t effectively coordinate its people. The telltale signs include confusion in the organization, uncoordinated efforts across teams and frustrated employees.&quot;<p>Can anyone who has quickly scaled headcount at a startup elaborate on some of the challenges in scaling communication + coordination and what you did to solve the issues?

I don&#x27;t even know what to say about this article, except that it perpetuates this ridiculous idea that there are laborers at the bottom and people above those laborers who know how to communicate and effectively distribute knowledge across all other groups.<p>If people were computers, then what&#x27;s being described is a tree of systems, and each node in the tree has full connection to its siblings and its children. But anyone who&#x27;s designed large scale networks knows that this is horrible for data, because it doesn&#x27;t allow for failure, and creates bottlenecks. This is why spine leaf architecture is so important.<p>But people are not computers. Communication is way more lossy than that. What this article fails to point out is that you actually have multiple decision trees in organizations, the architects and technical leads in a software group, vs the people managers. And combining those two roles creates horrible inefficiencies in descision making. Similarly, empowering people closest to the problem to make decisions means that the organization is much more nimble and increases agility.<p>I don&#x27;t know what this article&#x27;s point is, because it does help understand what effective leadership is.

Has anyone found a derivation for the formula in the article? The n(n-1) terms are clearly the cost of managing the relationships between subordinates, but I&#x27;m not understanding the motivation for the n(2^(n-1)) term.

&gt;&gt;&gt; n(2^(n-1) + n-1); n = # of reports<p>The same formula could be applied to the people <i>above you</i> in the management structure, or the number of stakeholders in a project.