how to identify the right span of control for your company.

Establishing the right span of control in your organization is essential to keep things running smoothly. When the span of control is too wide, employees risk feeling abandoned and managers struggle to monitor performance. When it’s too narrow, employees can feel micromanaged and inefficiencies multiply across the company.

Every company should therefore aim for a span of control that is ‘just right’ for them. It needs to enable high levels of efficiency and productivity and allow employees to develop without negatively impacting business operations. 

The goal is simple, but getting there is a challenge. Let’s start by answering the most relevant question.

what is the ideal span of control for my company?

Unfortunately, the answer is — it depends. The ideal span of control (or span of management, as it’s sometimes known) depends on a multitude of different factors. They range from the complexity of employees’ daily tasks and their skill levels to the use of technology within the organization. Even more hard-to-define factors like company culture and the leadership style in the chain of command play a part.

For that reason, it’s difficult to give an exact answer that applies to all companies. It’s OK to suggest relative scales like wide, narrow or balanced — for example, in a company where employee tasks are highly repetitive, a wide span of control may work well. However, setting a specific number is often misleading. 

Even among companies in the same industry, small differences can cause the span of control benchmark to differ significantly.

Additionally, even if it was helpful to use a benchmark set by another company, simply mandating a new span of control in a top-down way is rarely a recipe for success. In order for the proposed organizational structure to have the positive effects you want, it has to reflect the reality of your employees and provide a balance between guidance and autonomy. 

the importance of a balanced span of control

Identifying the right span of control for your organization is a balancing act. Having a span of control that is too wide can create issues — but trying to solve them by simply turning employees into managers can create new problems, such as title inflation.

An ideal span of control provides a comfortable middle ground between these pairs of problems. For example, employees should have access to support and guidance when they need it while still having the autonomy to do their job independently. Similarly, teams should be small enough that managers have enough time to deal with every member — but not so small that managers have nothing to do.

identifying the right span of control for your organization

Establishing this balance requires identifying your company’s requirements and the type of leadership that helps employees perform. McKinsey does this by defining five kinds of managerial archetypes — starting with the ‘player/coach’ manager who is very busy, deals only with complex, strategic tasks, and leads a diverse team that works in an agile, non-standardized way. For a leader like this, McKinsey suggests a fairly narrow span of control of three to five direct reports.

The list of archetypes ends with the ‘coordinator’ manager, who manages a team that performs highly standardized, repetitive tasks with little variation over time. According to McKinsey, a wide span of control of 15 direct reports or more could work well.

You don’t have to follow McKinsey’s archetypes to the letter, but they do provide a good way of thinking about the ideal span of control at your company. Rather than basing your span of control on the size of your company, your industry, or the organizational structures of your competitors, you should base it on the circumstances of your existing managers and staff. These circumstances vary across departments, so even if you see a particular span of control working well in one department, an entirely different span of control may be needed in another. 

calculate your company’s ideal span of control

Put simply, finding the right span of control means asking the right questions about your company and management style. However, identifying those questions isn’t always so simple.

Our span of control calculator helps you get started. It’s Excel-based, and contains 10 questions about the nature of your work, your organizational structure and your employees’ competencies. Choose the answers that best match your company, and you’ll get an indication of what span of control could work best. It won’t give you a definite answer, but it will provide you with a starting point for further investigation and discussion.