Cameron Herold advises a COO on managing workload by limiting direct reports. He argues leaders should have no more than five direct reports, or seven to eight at most, to focus on growing their team's skills, handling strategy, and managing culture instead of getting buried in day-to-day work.
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I really struggle with keeping up with all of my tasks and keeping up or keeping in touch with all 11 direct reports. How do I find a balance between my responsibilities?
When you're the second in command of a company and you're the CEO of about, as I recall, about 100 employees, you can't lead 11 people anymore. You might be able to quickly oversee them and quickly manage them, but our job as leaders is to grow people. It's to grow their skill set and grow their confidence, is to help them remove obstacles. It's to be there and do deep dives into their business areas so that we can help them. If you have 11 people, you're spread too thin because you have no time to do your job and you have no time to really grow their skills and grow their confidence or do the deep dives or the skip level meetings to really get into their businesses. So I think you really need to thin that back out a little bit. Ideally, a CEO should only ever have five direct reports at most, because you also have culture, strategy and your board. And I treat each of those as a direct report. So I only allow a CEO to have a maximum of five. I would love CEOs to be maximum of seven or eight. Now, if you're a manager of an area and everyone in that area does exactly the same thing, you can have many more direct reports because, you know, as an example, when I was with College Pro Painters, I was on the very senior leadership team at College Pro Painters. One summer, I had 32 franchisees that I recruited and trained and coached. But every franchisee did the same job. And I'd been a franchisee for three years before, so I really knew the job. So the fact that I was coaching all of these different franchisees, I was effectively teaching them all the same thing and moving them all faster. So if you're the head of a sales group, you can have way more than the eight people. But if you're running seven or eight different business areas, there's no way you can understand each of the business areas and all of their moving parts and all of their people effectively if you have that many. So you have to thin that one out.
