There’s a great, thought-provoking article today in the March 24, 2008 Wall Street Journal. by George Anders, entitled: Overseeing More Employees with Fewer Managers.  The sub-title of the article identifies the source of this so-called trend: Consultants Are Urging Companies to Loosen Their Supervising Views.

Some key points:

"Assigning more workers to each boss started catching on during the corporate restructuring pushes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when flatter organizational models took hold. Now some consultants are urging companies to loosen their views of supervising, so organizations can run with fewer bosses. Research in Europe suggests that a manager can oversee 30 or more employees, in part by using technology to communicate and help monitor work."

And:

"If you’re stuck with the traditional emphasis on checking, controlling and intervening, it takes real heroics to push as far as 12 direct reports," says Michael Hammer, a leadership coach in Cambridge, Mass. "You need to change what it means to be a manager."  (Mr. Hammer is the author of the 1993 book, "Reengineering the Corporation.")

Art’s opinion: a lot of bad business and poor decisions have been executed under the mantra of "reengineering" over the last 20 years.

The article goes on to suggest that by providing front-line workers more responsibility and access to improved communications technology (such as e-mail), the span of control can naturally increase from the traditional 7-10 view to 30 or more.  The technique emphasizes management intervention for problem solving as the primary reason to connect. 

Art’s Opinion: My gut reaction to the ideas put forth in this article is slightly mixed.  I rankle at approaches that focus on improving efficiency and reducing cost by redefining core leadership responsibilities. My consultant radar goes off whenever I see the primary role of mid-level managers distilled down to checking, controlling and intervening.  That narrow view eliminates a lot of the charter of any leader for talent identification and development, active, constructive feedback and career planning.  I also rankle at anything that suggests that e-mail is a potential substitute for managerial conversations.  Augmentation yes, substitute, never.

One of my favorite quotes from the article: "In addition, managers with wide spans of control tend to get paid more and are promoted to run larger groups, the authors found. That could lead ambitious managers to look for ways to widen their spans of control."   

Art’s opinion: Go figure.  Not sure that I want to design my revolutionary new management approach around the age-old desire for ambitious leaders to grow their fiefdoms.  We already know the results from this type of management innovation.

Harry Truman’s Nemesis: The Two-Handed Economist:

Sorry Harry, but there may be a good, "On the other hand" here.  I am all for organizations seeking ways to improve effectiveness and efficiency in managing people.  As long as they don’t dilute the charter and primary purpose of any leader to a point where it is fundamentally unrecognizable.  Reducing the number of managers and increasing span of control may possibly be good outcomes of well-thought out approaches to deliberately building in leadership skills at lower levels in the organization.  More time on pro-active mentoring/coaching and career planning, as well as identification of developmental assignments and less time on "checking, controlling and intervening" as Mr. Hammer suggests, and leadership span of control may very naturally be allowed to increase. 

However, beware the tendency of leaders to blindly follow a consultant’s guidance and reduce the number of managers and increase span of control, without thinking through the fundamental change to the definition of what a manager is supposed to do.  It is a human tendency to look for fast results and worry about consequences later.  In this case, the ramifications of misapplying the advice are huge.

The bottom-line: 

On the margin, I am concerned about the seemingly superficial sounding guidance coming from the consultant(s) in this article.  I think that we’ve all seen too many quick fixes to the people/cost side of the equation to know that there are huge negative ramifications from getting this wrong. The best advice may come from one of the companies interviewed that indicated that it is "putting more effort into redesigning work environments so that teams can naturally expand and contract more easily as projects evolve."  This approach takes into account our increasingly project-driven world, staffed by knowledge workers distributed across geographies and cultures. 

Tomorrow’s effective leaders are better served focusing on bringing the right resources to bear at a point in time than they are being constrained by a consultant derived goal to reduce managers and costs by increasing span of control.  It’s time to reengineer the old school thinking that leads to dangerous advice about leadership.