Welcome to Manager Tools.

Today's topic, span of control guidelines.

Here we go.

Simple question mark.

How many people can the average manager supervise and do we have any rules to apply when creating

team sizes get that question fairly frequently.

Pretty frequently yep and there's no really right answer. There's no right number. But guys if you need a starting point, the number is 6 to 8.

Okay. It is also better to test somebody first with maybe four people in a team lead role

which is much more possible than most of us realize you don't have to reorg to do it

you should't have to reorg to do it. You should always choose too few. If you're wondering

whether it should be six or eight, you should always choose six to start with. For a couple of reasons,

we'll explain. If the team is virtual or remote, the

average manager can handle less, not more. Remote managing is harder. You lack some of the tools that managers take for granted

after years of being co-located. And lastly, if the work that the team does is not complementary, in other words, it doesn't have to be

combined in order to produce value for the organization, then you can handle more. The majority of managers supervise people whose work is

complementary but we'll give you a couple examples hopefully to help with that.

Okay so let's talk about the fact that there is no right number because a lot of folks believe that to be true.

That's what I said, right?

Yeah.

And what they mean by right is right for everyone all the time sort of scientifically.

And people believe it for a couple of reasons that help themselves feel good about themselves. The first reason is when people

generally confront complex topics they want to believe that it's simply a bunch of

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