To tell a story, suppose you’re the CTO and you have a new engineering manager underneath you who is a mix of incompetent and vindictive. This manager won’t inform you of the personnel issue here, and the reports unlikely to reach out if the CTO feels inaccessible and the manager is vindictive. It could perhaps be surfaced with skip-level 1-1s. This can happen if the CTO manages two middle managers. What if there are six?
Conversely: This also has implications for how many direct reports the middle manager probably has. If I have skip-level 1 on 1 meetings, or some other upward review process, my response potentially looks very different depending on whether I’m one of 2 or 6 direct reports. 6, and there’s a lot of people saying a lot of things, I’m part of a crowd and can be fairly open and honest. 2, and it’s much harder for me to trust that my boss won’t know who said what about them, if there’s anything that needs to be said that might incur retaliation.
Otherwise, overall agreed with most of this. Many companies and groups scale too quickly because they think it’s what they’re supposed to do, for many reasons. Some others really should scale but can’t or won’t.
Conversely: This also has implications for how many direct reports the middle manager probably has. If I have skip-level 1 on 1 meetings, or some other upward review process, my response potentially looks very different depending on whether I’m one of 2 or 6 direct reports. 6, and there’s a lot of people saying a lot of things, I’m part of a crowd and can be fairly open and honest. 2, and it’s much harder for me to trust that my boss won’t know who said what about them, if there’s anything that needs to be said that might incur retaliation.
Otherwise, overall agreed with most of this. Many companies and groups scale too quickly because they think it’s what they’re supposed to do, for many reasons. Some others really should scale but can’t or won’t.