Span of control

What is a good span of control?

It depends on the work, not on a universal number. Five to eight direct reports is a common range for complex, judgement-heavy work where the manager coaches closely; routine, standardised work supports spans in the teens or beyond. The question to ask of any span is what kind of management the work requires: development-intensive roles need narrow spans, self-running teams tolerate wide ones.

The costs at both extremes

Too narrow and you get layers: decisions crawl, managers micromanage to fill their day, and the management wage bill grows faster than headcount. Too wide and management stops happening: one-on-ones vanish, feedback dries up, new starters drift through onboarding unattended, and engagement sags in exactly the pattern an engagement survey will later confirm. Both extremes show up in the manager multiplier: the quality of the immediate manager is one of the strongest levers on team engagement, and span decides how much manager each person actually receives.

Using span deliberately

Map actual spans across the organisation before any restructure; the spread is usually enormous and unexamined. Then set target ranges by work type rather than one corporate number, and treat persistent outliers as design questions: a manager of two is a layer pretending to be a job, and a manager of eighteen doing complex work is a burnout in progress.