Business Management Trend: Span of Control

Anyone who is remotely interested in the field of business is likely well aware of the fact that management trends and new ideas about leadership and organization seem to be everywhere. If it's not a new book promising better sales and better organization, it's an infomercial on television that promises to be able to teach the secrets of getting rich. However, as has been proven time and time again, some of the most effective things that we can learn to make ourselves better businessmen and better leaders are also some of the oldest and most well documented ideas.

Although modern business and organization has strangely turned away from many of these classic ideals, when we actually take the time to stop and think about it, we find that many of these ideas are absolutely essential to running a better business, and can help with nearly all aspects. With regards to leadership, perhaps one of the most important ideas to consider is what is known as "span of control".

Span of control is closely related to other classical ideals of business, such as division of labor and hierarchical organization. Essentially, the idea of span of control deals with how many people one person can effectively supervise. In a business sense, we must ask ourselves the questions of how many people can one person effectively manage? Although we may think that it is best to allow one person to control as many people as possible, the traditional theory dictates that this is simply not the case.

According to the theory of span of control, the larger and wider the spans are, the more effective the organization will be as a whole. What this means is that it is best to structure the organization as a pyramid, and a limited span should be given out at each level. For example, if we have an organization with roughly four thousand employees, there would be multiples of four at each span level. So, one person would exist at the top, followed by four people under him. Those four under the CEO would each have 16 people that report to them. Those sixteen people would have 64 under them, and 64 individuals would be reported to by 256 employees.

This may sound like a somewhat strange way to organize a business, but it is surprisingly effective. When we break up the cluster that can sometimes happen when middle management becomes too many or too powerful, we are opening up the organization to better lines of communication and more effective methods of organization and management.

Span of control helps us avoid several key elements that lead businesses to failure. However, there are several important things to remember about the idea before we take it to heart. Mainly, the idea illustrated by the span of control is that ideas must flow both upward and downward. Meaning that the idea of the "pyramid" we discussed before means that supervisors must be willing to take communication from those under them, and must be equally willing to communicate with those above them. This is one of the primary reasons that the number employees best organized by the span of control remains slightly in doubt. Some have suggested that rather than simply looking at the number of employees under an individual, we should also look at the functions of the employees, the skill level of the manager and a number of other factors which could greatly influence how effective the organization of a business is as a whole.

While span of control does have some issues of clarity, it also helps us to see and thus solve many important problems that arise within businesses. Perhaps one of the most important problems that comes up all to frequently is the "bloating" of a business or organization. Bloating is the idea that there are too many people managing or supervising too few people. While this may not sound all that damaging, it means that communication lines are constantly jammed, promotions become meaningless, and the entire organization is being crippled from the inside out. However, if we follow the idea of the span of control, we learn that we can organize our business so as to prevent such from happening, by adapting only a limited number of people in control, and thus making the business more effective as a whole.

Although the idea of span of control is by no means perfect, it is definitely a useful technique for learning to better organize our businesses and helping to construct effective organizations. We must not be careful to make the span of control the only idea that we use in creating the structure of our organization, but it can, and should, be used an effective tool to make sure that we avoid the bloating and confusion which can come with a poorly organized business or company plan. The better we organize our business, and the more time that we put into organization and planning, the more effective we will be, the more successful our companies will be, and the more intelligent we will be as individuals.