> 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.
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.
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.