Getting Organized

As you might expect, Organization is very nearly a science in and of itself, encompassing everything from organizational design to how you arrange items on your desk and I don’t intend to try to cover it all in a single blog post. That said, there are a few key concepts I want to call to your attention precisely because they are so little known and poorly understood – even by the people who should know better.

First off, let’s consider idea of organizational design. Clearly, we want to have as few levels or “layers” of management as we can, since management personnel command high salaries but don’t themselves generate revenue. This means having a few managers and as many workers as we can. In a perfect world, we would just have the CEO supervise everyone else, producing a company with only two levels (an extremely “flat” structure, in business school terms). Unfortunately, this is impossible except in very small organizations. There is a limit to the number of subordinates (or subordinate units) a given manager can supervise effectively; in b-school terms this is referred to as Span of Control.

If our people are doing work that requires very little direction (physical labor, like digging ditches, being the most common example) then a single supervisor might be able to control as many as 30 of them; if they are doing complex intellectual tasks (accounting, writing code, consulting, managing a department) then the Span is more likely to be in the 3 to 8 range. This isn’t an easy balance to strike, but it is critical to the long-term success of the organization. If the span is too large, quality will inevitably suffer because the supervisors will be unable to correct mistakes, and efficiency is likely to drop because the supervisors will also have too many subordinates to direct effectively. If the span is too small, the company will lose money paying too many management personnel, and is likely to suffer from micromanagement on the part of the underutilized management personnel.

Also, note that the Span of Control will vary at different levels of the organization. One foreman can probably handle several dozen ditch-diggers, but a manager will have his hands full trying to supervise more than five or six foremen and their crews, and a Director will do very will to control more than three or four work groups.

Then there’s the issue of duplication of effort. Quite often in large organizations you will have multiple departments engaged in the same task, while other activities are completely ignored. During the planning process you will have broken the overall mission of the company down into goals, objectives, and tasks; while getting organized it pays to group those tasks by similarity, so that work groups with the resources to handle multiple similar tasks are assigned to do so, and multiple groups are not assigned to the same things.

Of course, for any of this happen, the management personnel at all levels need to become involved in the process; ultimately, it is just as important for a single team leader to organize his or her people into the optimal configuration as it is for the Chief Operating Officer to make sure his or her divisions are not working at cross-purposes. The only way to be sure that your subordinates (or subordinate units) are operating efficiently, not duplicating effort, and receiving the correct level of supervision is to understand the process and know what needs to be done – and what everyone reporting to you is able to do. If you came in at the entry level and have worked your way up, you probably already understand what the people and groups reporting to you are doing. If not, there’s no time like the present to find out…