I just finished reading Steven Sinofsky’s post about what managers do and team sizes are at Microsoft. Its a facinating read and I highly recommend it. Perhaps just as interesting is some of the comments that came in with the post.
Actually – I have this theory about management structures, especially when it comes to organisational agility. I define organisational agility as the ability for all parts of the organisation to effectively report on issues affecting the organisation and for the command and control structure to react quicky effecting not only the top levels of management but also the lower echelons.
The ability of particular management structure to react is (in my opinion) directly related to the depth of the management structure. Imagine if you will two organisations, represented as an upturned cup of Jelly. The second company (Company B) has more layers of management than Company A but essentially they have the same impact in the market place (the active surface area at the bottom is the same).
In the business as usual scenario both organisations are as effective as each other although I suspect that Company B probably costs a little bit more to operate. The probl is that when the market starts to change that change needs to be communicated through more layers, so essentially the top of the organisation has to make extreme adjustments before the bottom of the organisation is going to move.
So effectively what I am saying is that the more layers you have, the less agile you are going to be. So what is so good about being agile? Well the fundamental reason is that you can afford to make mistakes simply because its not going to take you twelve months to correct them.