tl;dr: Building a team structure that is optimized for agility.
Over the last 7 months, my team at Gtmhub has grown from 3 to 20.
Most of the people on the team are my direct reports.
Traditional management orthodoxy says that the largest number of direct reports that a manager can have is in the 6-7 range.
In the OKR Bible, aka John Doerr’s Measure What Matters, the “new” approach that OKRs empower suggests that a leader can have up to 20 direct reports.
As I’ve been thinking about the future of the Gtmhub marketing organization, I’ve been struggling with what is the best way to go. As CMO, I’m aware that my actions have consequences and that some of these consequences may even outlast my tenure in the role. As a shareholder, that’s something that I need to consider.
What’s more, we talk about organizations that are built to succeed in the “Age of Outcomes” where work, space, and time have all been “unbundled” from each other.
The challenge here is similar to something I recall from my Sprinklr days, where my CEO would say, “we’re creating a category-defining company that no one here has ever worked in before. They don’t even know what it will look like. They only know what they already know.”
The risk is that we are all creatures of habit and prisoners of our pasts so we will naturally say, “oh, this is how it worked in my previous company, so I will do the same thing here.”
But that’s not the approach I want to take.
I don’t want to throw away everything from before, there’s plenty of goodness, but I do want to create a team and a culture that is as flat as possible, that is optimized to get the most from the OKR methodology as possible, and which can remain agile, flexible, and empowering even as the team grows into the future.
The hard part is that I don’t really know how to do that.
My hope is that being open with my team and others and engaging them in a collaborative process that is optimized for outcomes and their personal/professional strengths, that we will be able to co-create such a “future-proof” organization.
BTW, this applies to all organizations, not just “traditional” companies.
I was reading the “Ultimate DAO Report” that the team at Bankless put out and if you look at slide 51, you’ll see that coordination is a big area of concern.
Empowering decentralized teams, whether they work for a DAO or a company, to align around outcomes is going to be one of the big leadership challenges in the coming decades.
I guess that makes me feel better about the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing.
