Lead Essay
The purpose of hierarchy is autonomy
How many layers does a large organization actually need?
In the abstract, perhaps very few.
- Imagine a company with an enterprise leadership team at the top…
- Some meaningful operating units in the middle…
- And then scores of teams doing the work.
So, three layers? It’s an appealing picture, especially if you have spent any time inside an organization where every decision seems to work its way through fifteen people before returning to where it started, almost unchanged.[1]
But when you fill those three layers with several thousand people (assuming traditional ways of managing) the spans become ridiculous. Someone will end up with 60 direct reports, those folks lose clarity and connection, and HR will put another layer back. And then another when someone’s valid career ambitions push them toward management. Before long, we’ll be arguing about whether five layers is still “flat,” whether a manager with two direct reports counts as a layer, and how many steps anyone ought to sit from the CEO.
A higher-quality debate is “What do we need hierarchy to do?” in which I would argue that we should design hierarchy to handle shared decisions so teams can get on with their own work.
That requires us to separate things the org chart traditionally bundles together, work out which decisions really
