Steady
Level 2. Scores 26 to 50. Sustainable load. Write down your ceiling before it is tested.
Your load is sustainable. You are inside the band for your role or just at its edge, your contact hours are real but not consuming the week, and the layers below you are few enough that decisions come to you with their context intact. Once the benchmark publishes you will see how many leaders land here.
Steady is not a place to stay by default. It is the place from which the next change is easy to get wrong. Two things push a Steady leader into Stretched inside a quarter, and neither feels like a decision at the time. The first is one more direct report. A reorganisation puts an orphaned function under you, a strong person asks to report to you, a manager leaves and you absorb their team for "a few weeks". Look at your calendar supported span above. If you are already at it, one more report is the whole margin.
The second is a change in the mix. Two new hires, or a team going remote, adds contact hours without adding a name to the org chart, and the score moves without the count moving.
A VP I worked with ran a team that was working well. She knew every person's week. Then a peer left, and she took his strongest engineer for a few weeks while the role was filled. The role was never filled. One more report did not add one more meeting. It added a person who did not know how she worked.
Someone who needed context the others already had, and who pulled them into questions that used to stay with her. Her one on ones started moving. Within a quarter she was the bottleneck she used to warn other people about. Afterwards she said she should have named her ceiling before the day she was asked.
What to do with this: write down your ceiling. A number, on paper, for the span you will not go past without giving something up, and what you will give up when you do. Say it to whoever you report to before it is tested. Leaders who have said the number out loud get to keep it. Leaders who have not get asked to take one more team.
If your hours per report figure is under one hour a week, your load is Steady because your contact is thin. That is a different problem and the calculator cannot see it. Your team can.
Next step: if you manage managers, the quality of their one on ones is now your main lever. Send them the 1:1 meeting builder and compare scores.
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.