Opportunity

We all have heard that flatter organizations are superior to organizations with long reporting lines, but why? Simply because deep layers of management lead to several issues:

• Communication is diminished: communication from the leaders to the employees, and from customers to the leaders. It's like the childhood game of "telephone," the more people in the communication chain the more the message becomes changed and garbled.

• Accountability is diminished. If your boss gives you a task, you are accountable. If you are able to delegate that task to an underling, who can delegate to his/her underling, etc, then accountability for the task is diluted or lost completely.

• Efficiency is diminished. Which is more efficient, one 15-person staff meeting or five 3-person staff meetings? Does it make sense to have managers go through the entire HR training, performance evaluation training, etc, each year for a couple of employees? Executives who spend part of their time managing and part of their time as an individual contributor may do neither function well.

• Decision-making is compromised. In an environment with poor communication, poor accountability, and inefficient management processes, decision-making is hampered.

• Wasted effort: unnecessary managers create or continue unnecessary work to justify their existence. Have you ever noticed that when some managers leave, they don't need to be replaced? Resource limitations are a great way to focus on essential activities.

• High expenses: unnecessary managers doing unnecessary work are an expensive drag on the organization. Compensation for your management team will be reduced by the need to pay unnecessary managers.

• Morale suffers: poor communication, lack of accountability, inefficiencies, poor decisions, high expenses, lower compensation and unnecessary managers doing unnecessary work, all lead to poor morale. Unnecessary managers are in constant fear of losing their jobs and spend time and mental energy looking for opportunities outside of the company, poisoning the work environment.

For humans, the benefits of physical fitness are obvious and undeniable. However, fitness requires discipline, some work, and good habits.

The same is true for organizational fitness. Lean organizations, with high spans of control, and fewer layers of management are superior. The next section describes a common redesign process organizations use to increase their management spans of control and reduce layers of management.