Corporate America has entered the era of the megamanager. For years now, employers have assigned more and more workers per boss in an effort to minimize the cost of managers and accelerate decision-making.
In a team with too many members, accountability is spread too thin, he wrote: “Very often when a management team wants to accomplish something new … everyone on the team says, ‘We’ll get it done,’ meaning they will add it to the long list of tasks already on their plate. But when efforts are 1% of a lot of people’s jobs, it will never get done.”
Smaller teams, with shorter “to-do” lists, are incentivized to give their full focus to any given task, he explained: “You need a team 100% dedicated to the mission—and everyone else supports them.”
Eliminating layers of management is intended to speed up decisions and innovation by cutting hierarchy and bringing leaders closer to frontline employees and customers, thereby boosting engagement and ownership. But in such arrangements, junior staff can get overlooked, employees can feel directionless, and managers can burn out—or, as Dimon points out, accountability for getting things done can be diluted.
Flat structures often don’t last long, as employees gravitate toward more managerial interaction. “What happens in most organizations is eventually either a formal or an informal structure appears sort of underneath direct reports,” André Spicer, executive dean of Bayes Business School in London and a professor of organizational behavior, previously told Fortune.
