If the world is flat, why aren’t our organizations?

I know some hierarchy is useful and efficient, but sometimes organizations get top heavy. Personally, I’ve always thought a manager can reasonably supervise 7-9 people in addition to performing other job responsibilities. 10 is possible, but gets unwieldy. Right now, I supervise 5 people, and each of these supervises 0, 5, 6, 4, and 3 people. Of these teams, only one has another tier. So, using my metric, I could flatten my organization significantly. Why shouldn’t I do this? We might function better as a team, improve communication, and be more agile. In the future, I think we’ll all be independent contractors, anyway. We’ll have chips like baseball cards or D&D profiles: you’re +3 in charisma, +5 in meeting management, -2 in punctuality, and neutral in communications.

3 Responses to “If the world is flat, why aren’t our organizations?”

  1. Kyle said:

    Oct 03, 08 at 4:21 am

    7-9 people with other job responsibilities is pretty ambitious unless the staff you manage is really good at their job and need only periodic guidance. If your staff are somewhat under skilled, prone to needing constant validation for the smallest decisions, and unable to work with their peers, than 7-9 is a death knell for you.

    You know, hypothetically…

  2. admin said:

    Oct 06, 08 at 4:42 pm

    Well, if we all only supervised, say, 3-4 people, don’t you think our org would be way too hierarchical? Hypothetically, if I had staff that were underskilled, passive, and, say, not interested in actually improving systems and services, then, hypothetically speaking, I would consider some non-hypothetical performance improvement “incentives.” Hey, what about that radio device they might use on cows?

  3. Bill said:

    Oct 08, 08 at 2:20 pm

    As with everything, “it depends”. I have worked on a large engineering projects with over 600 people and a grand total of 3, yes 3 levels of management (plus the worker bee level). But that was a fairly homogeneous organization – all focused on a single grand task. It seems that the more heterogeneous the group is, the less flat the tree can be.


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