Just How Many Managers Do You Need To Manage A Team?

John works in a large multinational organisation. There are four other members on his team. Together that makes it a team of five. Keep that number in mind. John then has a team manager responsible for those five staff members. He also has a manager whose job is to manage those five employees, then there is the branch boss responsible for John’s team and another team, then the general manager, also responsible for the same two teams.

Really funny, isn’t it? It would seem like a scenario taken from a Mel Brooks’ movie, if it was not for the fact that rather it being a movie script, it is taken from a real company scenario!

I often wonder, just how many managers it takes to manage a small group of people?  Either those managing are not doing a good job of it (and that reminds me of an old joke “Why do policemen always walk the streets in pairs? Because one of them can read and the other can write!”), or there is something very, very wrong with the way many companies are structured.

In times when profit maximisation and cost cutting are the hottest trends in town (and rightly so), it is almost impossible to comprehend how this type of wasteful unproductiveness is still allowed to go on. What a pity that the common sense is not that common and that those in charge of their divisions/organisations too often are too far removed from the reality of the business structure in place.

It would be unfair to say that every organisation is managed that way. So many are not. But for the employees of those who are, the levels of frustration are reaching the peak on quite a regular basis. ‘Overmanagement’ (too many managers in proportion to the number of staff they oversee) often comes at a price of understaffing on the division/ground level.

So much money could be saved, even more money could be made if every company looked at the efficiency of its structure and its relevance as to where the company curently is and where it is heading.