Relationships a manager must maintain grow combinatorially with direct reports, which caps effective span.
Graicunas's 1933 formula: five reports generate 100 potential relationships, six generate 222. The combinatorial growth is why span limits appear at similar numbers across very different organisations.
In practice
- A manager with six reports spends the week in one-to-ones; the same manager with nine stops holding them and hears about problems a fortnight late.
- A charity that grew from four staff to eleven under one director finds the director is now a bottleneck nobody designed.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- How organisations behave when nobody is steering