How Many People Should You Manage?
I recently met a smart chief technology officer of a company with about a hundred engineers. He said, “Every engineering manager should be able to manage about fifteen to twenty engineers, plus the projects they work on, too.”
That is much too much for a manager to do. If you don't care how well you manage, you can manage a large number of people. It’s the same principle that applies to code or projects. If you don’t care how good the code is, you can write as much as you want. If it doesn’t have to work, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t care how good your project management is, you can manage as many as you want.
I’m not talking about micromanagement. I’m talking about providing a learning environment, coaching when it's wanted, and building a trusting relationship with each person. That’s it. I expect the people in my group to spend the rest of their time learning on their own and being responsible.
If you are managing projects, you shouldn't also be managing all the people—certainly not up to twenty. You should dedicate yourself to the employees, and you need time to meet with some of them each week. Here's what else you—as a good manager—should do:
- Hold one-on-ones with everyone. They don't necessarily have to be weekly, but you should have a private conversation with each person at least every two weeks. These meetings can include career development.
- Conduct a weekly meeting where everyone in the test group learns something. It can be about technical practices, tools, or project management techniques. The group decides what they want to learn; as the manager, you should be facilitating their learning.
- Make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing. But don't hold a serial status meeting—that's boring. Take people’s email statuses, collate them, and email it to everyone so the interested parties can read it. Because they are all working on different projects, they might discover things others might want to know.
- Facilitate problem solving. Know when you're no longer technical enough and can't solve their problems for them. Just provide information they can use and make it easier for them to solve issues on their own.
- Make sure the right people are invited to the right meetings. This is more difficult than it sounds. If you're being invited to meetings that don't benefit you or anyone else, get uninvited and make sure the right testers get invited instead.
If you are managing more than nine people as a manager, rethink what you could do if you had fewer people to manage. If you are not having one-on-ones every week or every other week, what else are you doing? And is it really more important?
Management is not about micromanagement. It’s about creating an environment in which each person can do his best work. If you are too busy to do that, are you really managing?
