Headroom
Level 1. Scores 0 to 25. You have room. Deliberate, or distant?
You have room. Your direct report count sits under the band for your role, your contact hours are modest, and there are few layers between you and the work. On paper you could lead more people than you do.
Before you take that as a compliment, ask why. Headroom shows up for three reasons and only one is good. The good one is that you have built a team that runs its own week and you are deliberately keeping your span small so you can do the work only you can do: strategy, hiring, the two decisions a quarter that matter. If that is you, the number is right and the risk is that someone above you reads it as spare capacity.
The second reason is that your span is small because the organisation is small, and the job is about to change. Founders with three reports score Headroom right up until the month they have nine, and by then the habits are set.
The third reason is that the contact hours are low because you are not in contact. A leader with seven reports and two hours a week of one on ones and team meetings will score Headroom, and their team will describe them as absent. Check your hours per report figure above. Under an hour a week per person, for a team that is not senior and stable, is not efficiency. It is distance.
I do not believe in one right number for a CEO. The right span is the number of people you can give real attention to and still have time left for the work only you can do. Most leaders I work with start to feel it somewhere around seven or eight, and earlier when those people are new. The founders I meet with far more than that did not choose it.
Every early hire reported to the founder because there was nobody else, and nobody went back and redrew the chart. That is not a structure. It is a history. Without a standing leadership meeting, every decision routes through the founder, and the founder becomes the switchboard for their own company. Pick your span on purpose, before the company picks it for you.
What to do with this: if the number is deliberate, write down the reason and protect it. If the number is small because the company is small, decide now what your span will be at the next size and what you will hand off to get there. If the contact hours are low, take the management style quiz and see whether Sponsor is a choice or a symptom.
Next step: score how the contact you do have is spent with the 1:1 meeting builder.
Next step
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About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Span of Control Calculator, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.