Anonymous wrote:Three direct reports, two additional indirect reports, usually a couple of interns, and in total I manage a team of seven, which includes my boss. We have split responsibilities -- I do management and admin, my boss is the SME.
I do project management -- which includes scheduling, resource management (i.e. figuring out who to assign to what tasks for a project/across projects), client relations, knowledge management, business development, and intra-organizational communication. My boss supervises and directs the work product and provides direction on how to do the work, and she signs off on the final product.
If I were leading a team of 20, I'd look for 2-4 trusted individuals and have them lead smaller teams. Does your work lend itself to being split up that way? I'd also delegate some of the pieces to smaller working groups (which may not align perfectly with those teams). So for instance, you might have a gadget design team and a gadget engineering team -- but then you might also form a business development working group and tap a couple of people from each of those teams to be in that group. Then you delegate e.g. some of the research functions of business development to that smaller working group, and they report back to you on a regular basis.
You aren’t managing a team of seven if one of those seven is your boss.