What you share
A manager is not a thing in common
Eight people sharing one manager have eight separate relationships with the same person. That is a property of each of them, not something held between any two.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerEvery working pair in this grid includes this person
- 02The designer
- 03The data analyst
- 04The product managerWrites the brief everybody reads
four people · 6 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 1 has only been in the same meeting · 2 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
To keep measurement transparent, teams can see the workflow in detail and agree together which information is useful, who can see it, and how long it should be retained.
The broader organisational question can also be checked against resources from ASQ.
On the pyramid of what a team shares, the widest row is almost always the same: everybody has the same manager. It is true of all eight, it is the reason the eight are a group at all, and it is worth examining because it is doing much less than its width suggests.
A shared manager is not a relationship between any two members. It is eight separate relationships that happen to terminate in the same place. Whatever each person has with their manager — trust, history, a weekly half hour — is theirs individually, and none of it transfers to anybody else in the box.
What a shared thing normally buys
Most rows on the pyramid buy something structural, and it is worth being specific about what, because the manager row buys none of it.
- A shared codebase means that one person's change arrives in another person's work whether either of them intended it. It produces reviews, disagreements and conversations with no organising effort at all. It is the single most productive row on most technical teams.
- A shared customer means two people hear the same complaint and have to agree on an answer. It produces coordination by necessity.
- A shared deadline means two people's work is finished at the same moment and therefore has to fit together before then. It produces a conversation on a known date.
- A shared duty — an on-call rota, a review roster — produces handovers, and a handover is a conversation that cannot be skipped.
In every case the shared thing creates an occasion where two members must deal with each other. That is what makes it a thing in common rather than a coincidence.
What the manager row buys
Consistency of treatment, which is real and valuable. One person decides workload, progression and fairness across all eight, which is far better than eight people being compared by nobody.
A single escalation point, which saves everybody the problem of working out who can settle a dispute.
Someone who holds the map. The manager usually knows what all eight are doing, which is the one piece of shared context in the box.
None of those produce an occasion where two members must deal with each other. They are all mediated. In fact the third one actively substitutes for such occasions: because the manager knows what everybody is doing, nobody else has to find out.
The substitution is the problem
This is the mechanism worth naming. A manager holding the map is efficient. Each person asks one well-informed person instead of searching among seven, and gets a faster answer.
The cost is that the search never happens, and the search is how pairs form. The thirty seconds somebody spends working out which of their colleagues would know is the thirty seconds in which they discover that one of their colleagues knows things.
A manager who answers every question correctly and immediately is, without intending it, keeping the network at its current size. This is not an argument for answering questions badly. It is an argument for occasionally answering with a name instead of an answer, which is covered in its own note later on.
What this means for the widest row
Treat it as the administrative row it is, and read the pyramid from the second row down.
A team whose widest genuinely shared thing — after the manager and the all-hands — is true of five of eight is an ordinary team. A team where it is true of three is a box containing sub-groups. A team where the manager row is the only one above two is not yet a team in the sense this site uses, and no amount of shared apparatus will change that until something else is shared.
The row that looks like an exception
A manager who works jointly with two members on one thing does create a pair between those two, and this is worth noting because it is the one way the hub produces a rim.
Three people on one output, all three in it, all three arguing about what it should say, produces three pairs rather than two. The manager is in two of them and the third exists independently of them.
It is the cheapest thing a hub-shaped team can do and it is almost never done, because the default is for the manager to work with one person at a time. Two is barely more effort and it is the difference between adding a spoke and adding a triangle.
A note on the opposite failure
There is a version of this argument that goes too far, and it ends with a manager deliberately withdrawing from the middle of a sparse network in order to force people to find each other.
It does not work, for the reason given in the note on manager-shaped teams: the exchanges that used to pass through the hub simply stop. What works is adding occasions — a shared duty, a joint deadline, a review rota — so that the pairs form around something, and then the hub becomes less necessary without anybody having to be unhelpful on purpose.