Bigger Teams Won't Fix Anything Without Better Managers

Your daily brief on leadership and business

As companies cut layers and hand managers more people, a fresh analysis from a long-running workplace research programme offers a useful reality check. The average number of direct reports per manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, nearly 50% higher than when the measurement began in 2013. For comparison, U.S. labour statistics suggest roughly one manager for every 11.5 employees.

The average, however, hides the real picture. The 2025 increase was driven largely by a two-percentage-point rise in teams of 25 or more. The median team has stayed at five to six people. In other words, most managers have not suddenly gained a crowd; a minority of very large teams is dragging the average up.

How teams are actually distributed

• 37% of managers oversee fewer than five people.
• 66% manage fewer than 10.
• 22% have 10 to 24 direct reports.
• 13% oversee 25 or more.

Talent beats team size

The research identifies four factors that determine whether a given span works. The first is engagement: for small and medium teams, higher engagement goes hand in hand with productivity, wellbeing and lower turnover. The second is individual contributor work. Some 97% of U.S. managers carry their own hands-on tasks, with a median of 40% of their time spent on them, and engagement falls as teams grow for managers above that threshold. The third is talent: with very large teams and heavy individual workloads, highly talented managers keep engagement up while others decline. Team size also hurts engagement most for remote and hybrid managers. The fourth is feedback. Meaningful weekly feedback nearly triples the share of engaged employees, yet only 16% of employees said their last conversation with a manager was extremely meaningful. Fifteen to thirty minutes, held consistently, is enough.

The authors sum it up neatly: "Manager talent trumps span of control," and "Increasing span of control alone is not a performance strategy." Before flattening further, they suggest leaders check their team-size distribution, find managers who can handle larger groups, measure engagement at team level, balance player-coach duties and make weekly feedback the norm. Handing someone 25 reports and a pep talk, it turns out, is not a plan.