Hi Emma,

We’ve always heard best practice tends to say roughly a span of 10:1, however, you might not want to go for a one size fits all ratio as it will depend so much on other factors based on your context or strategy and each team may have different needs.  You might want to consider these questions to help you think it through:

1. How dispersed are the team? If they’re managing people remotely it may take more leadership time then if they’re all in one location
2. What’s the capability of the people being managed? i.e. those with less experience in the team or less control over their own work may need more support (although could be supported with a mentor/buddy)
3. What’s the capability of the leaders?  How experienced are they in empowering their people, getting best from them etc..
4. How much of their role is pure leadership versus fulfilling another role? If they were an Accountant for example and 80% of their job was client/fee earning work, how much time have they got left for leading a team?
5. How diverse are the team that they manage in terms of what they do?  For example, if they are all Accountants doing the same type of work they might be easier to manage.
6. How easy is it for your leaders to manage their  team? If there lots of central process and compliance their span of control may need be reduced (or those processes streamlined to free them up).

Here are some good external articles:

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/how-to-identify-the-right-spans-of-control-for-your-organization

https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3913573/span-of-control-benchmarking-tool(paid resource)

https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/strategy/rewiring-organization-agility

I hope this helps. We’d love to know where you end up.

Good luck!

The Disruptive HR Club Team