How Many People Can Someone Lead?

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.<p>She&#x27;s a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a public school.

TFA implicitly conflates &quot;leadership&quot; and &quot;management&quot;, suggesting that the author is oblivious to the distinction.<p>Even when the author describes dividing the responsibilities of &quot;leadership&quot; among multiple people, they describe dividing both leadership and management responsibilities between those people.<p>This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the &quot;leader&quot;, individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the &quot;leader&quot;.<p>These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because of the leader&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>The best managers don&#x27;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.<p>But virtually all of the job postings you&#x27;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 &quot;leader&quot;. 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&#x27;s norms around work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc.<p>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.

This is called &quot;span of control&quot;, and it&#x27;s a well-studied subject.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Span_of_control" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Span_of_control</a>

The article touches on it a bit, but I think it also highly depends on the person.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things.<p>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.

Question really seems to be ‘how many people can someone <i>manage</i>’ not lead.<p>You can lead far more people than you can manage.

I found it interesting that the author was making a case for 2-3 people for someone inexperienced. I&#x27;ve seen people claim that you need to give someone new to leadership a team of 4-5 people because it is so easy to drop into micro-managing if you only have a couple reports.<p>I took on a lead role earlier this year and unless the 3 people on the team were all inexperienced or I had enough other things to work on, I don&#x27;t think it would be enough. I do feel like my balance of attention is better with a couple more relatively autonomous people involved.

I&#x27;d heard this anecdotally in the past, apparently there&#x27;s some meat to it.<p>The Marines have this number set to 3.<p>Marines obviously have different scenarios they have to deal with than most organizations. But it&#x27;s still an interesting idea.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;bill-murphy-jr&#x2F;the-us-marine-corps-uses-rule-of-3-to-organize-almost-everything-heres-how-learning-it-21-years-ago-changed-my-life.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;bill-murphy-jr&#x2F;the-us-marine-corps-uses-...</a>

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&#x2F;responsibilities).

See also Rands, “Seven plus or minus three”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;randsinrepose.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;seven-plus-or-minus-three&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;randsinrepose.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;seven-plus-or-minus-three...</a>

If you work in a matrix organization you’ll work on many projects which have have many managers and as a manager you’ll manage multiple projects involving much more than 4 or 5 people. TFA seemed to be getting at this with multiple managers but didn’t take it all the way through. Matrix management is not a panacea but it does help productivity by making sure that there is almost always some progress happening and that nobody is sitting still.

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?<p>I&#x27;ve been on a team where one manager was over 10+ people and I felt neglected and I felt like the people who didn&#x27;t pull their weight got away with it and that work was pushed off on me.<p>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&#x27;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?

Admiral Hyman Rickover -- one of the most successful engineering managers in history -- had about 40 direct reports: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;govleaders.org&#x2F;rickover.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;govleaders.org&#x2F;rickover.htm</a><p>&gt; &quot;Some management experts advocate strict limits to the number of people reporting to a common superior—generally five to seven. But if one has capable people who require but a few moments of his time during the day, there is no reason to set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key people report frequently and directly to me. This enables me to keep up with what is going on and makes it possible for them to get fast action. The latter aspect is particularly important. Capable people will not work for long where they cannot get prompt decisions and actions from their superior.&quot;

The number of people someone can lead is strictly based on their leadership score. For instance, as a 12th level wizard with a charisma modifier of +3 I can lead 23+1 people.

When it comes to ballroom dance it gets down to how many want to follow and where you want to lead them: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A</a> . And the rest isn&#x27;t turtles all the way down, rather it&#x27;s leadership in dance exemplifying leadership in other stuff.

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.

Management and leadership are not the same thing. One person can lead millions of people through clear and emotional articulation of their vision.

So, a single person can lead 3-4 people, but three people can lead 7-10. Sounds like those three people should each lead 3-4 people instead.

It depend on the person, and it depends on the job. The article does a lot of dancing around that obvious fact.

How many people can someone micromanage?

Any number of people.<p>Probably the author meant &quot;supervise&quot;.<p>There is fundamental difference between leadership and management and it is pretty poor performance on author&#x27;s part to write about leadership and management and not realize this.

&gt;How many people can someone lead?<p>The average person? I&#x27;d say 0.<p>Can it be taught outside of a highly organized situation? I&#x27;d say no.<p>Can it be taught from a book? I&#x27;d say no.