How do you know when it’s time to hire another manager?

There’s also situations where, you know, you might not really have clear delineations. Folks are working on multiple things. I do a little bit of operations, a little bit of marketing, a little bit of sales, right? And in that case, Then no, you don’t have divisions in the answer. That would be now. So it also might be a signal of, should I create different departments? What is the natural groupings of people? And that’s a conversation. If you are curious about how we’d map that out that I’d love to support you in.

Welcome to the managing mid simple podcast. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant through this show and my signature ops playbook. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager looking to learn the ropes?

Or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating, and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Entrepreneurs and business owners listening right now, we all started with big dreams, right? Freedom, impact, bringing our visions to life. But there’s a twist many of us didn’t see coming.

That managing a team is the hardest thing about running a business. And the words, because I said, so it doesn’t work with children or our employees drawing on my team operations experience in big tech and with business owners, I realized we often complicate how work gets done more than we need to. That’s why I wrote The Unstoppable Team. It’s a playbook for easing the complexities of team management, showing you the how behind the what and why of your vision.

This book’s about finding relief amid the chaos, injecting simplicity into tackling hard problems, and turning your team members into profit generating machines, all without burning you or them out. Kinda nice, right? So if you are ready to make this whole managing thing easier while scaling your business, head to Liagarvin. com slash the book, or amazon. com and get your copy of The Unstoppable Team today. Welcome back to the show today. I am answering one of the top questions that I have heard lately from you team leaders and business owners alike, which is when is the right time to hire another manager?

So first I want to thank you for either replying to my email when I advertise my podcast or my LinkedIn newsletter, or, or sending me direct message on Instagram, because that gives me a really good sense of what to talk about on the show. So if this question came from you, I really appreciate it. And we’re here to answer that question today. So when is the right time to hire another manager? Today I want to walk through five questions to ask ourselves to assess this.

And it’s not a one size fits all situation. There are a lot of factors at play, so we don’t always, you know, I can’t just say run through this list and yes, go for it. Because there’s also budget, right? Financial costs, uh, making sure that you have the right person that you’re going for. Do you promote from within or hire someone new? So really what I want to give you today is a guide so that you have clarity on, yes, directionally, I do want to hire another manager.

And then you can go about the whole hiring process, which is a conversation for another day. So what are these five questions? Well, first of all, You know, are you managing more than, you know, 5, 10, 15 people? And this is often the only question we answer where we then decide to hire a manager. But it’s not, it’s not the full story. And so this question, how many people are you managing? It’s often called span of control, right?

This is how many, you know, what is the ratio between managers and direct reports? And it depends a lot on the business that you’re running, on, you know, the autonomy of your team members, the type of work that they’re doing. For example, in some teams, it makes sense to have three direct reports to one managers. In, in engineering teams, like the work I used to do in the past, they’d have a way larger amount of, of, of folks under one manager because folks had a lot of clarity around their work.

And they have a ton of processes on, you know, how reviews and check ins go and all these different things. So they could actually have a lot more people under one manager. And so it really depends. But it is a good place to start. Are you managing 15 people, 20 people? Because if that’s the case, it’s probably going to be difficult to say, you know, I You know, yes, I can dedicate the time that I need to, to one on ones, to career conversations, to giving feedback and things like that.

So that’s the first question. And to assess, well, you know, if I’m managing three people, it doesn’t mean that it’s not okay to hire a manager. What does it mean? What is the time that each of your team members are taking from you? What is the time I should say that you want to dedicate to the managing of your team members? I should flip that question and, and then going from there. So span of control. How many people are you, are you managing is a good question.

And if you are managing, you know, between, you know, anything more than 10, I’ve seen get a little bit tricky for folks that can be less, it can be more, but I would say when you hit that 10 people marked where you are directly managing them, I would recommend if you want my advice, that is time for sure to hire another manager. Next question. Does your team need a lot of one on one support and guidance?

And like I said, well, this is what’s going to help you offset that span of control question. If you have three or four team members and they’re pretty junior or they’re just fresh out of school and they’re awesome, but you know, you really want to be coaching and supporting them. That might take a lot of time where you might say, yeah, I would love a manager to help, to help offload some of that work for me.

Like I said, if they are, you’ve hired a bunch of people and they’re deep experts in the industry you’re in, you know, maybe you have a service based industry. So they’ve got their appointments. They know what to do. They are just cranking through that every single day. And then you maybe need fewer managers because that oversight’s really clear. So a lot, you know, it’s, it’s going through who are my team members. What is the time each of them need?

Am I dedicating enough of that time? Maybe you aren’t right now, but you’re like, well, I kind of feel like I’m keep beating myself up over not meeting with them enough or not understanding enough what they need. So assessing what level of support do my team members need and am I able to provide that? Third question, and this is one I see we miss a lot. Okay, so I really want you to think critically about this and be really honest with yourself.

Okay. Am I able to adequately assess this person’s work? And again, there’s maybe times where you can’t hire the person that’s a subject matter expert in that field, but there are times when we can. And so I think knowing, am I able to really assess how this person’s work is going? If they’re doing a great job, what development areas they need, you know, where, where they’re really shining. That’s a really important question to answer. And if the answer’s no.

Then potentially hire a manager that can support them. And, and really, yes. Okay. I know exactly this kind of work. I’m an expert in that space. I know what they’re doing. Right. I know what they need improvement on. Now, if the, if the answer is no, I’m not able to evaluate this kind of work the best I can, but you can’t hire a manager this time, then it’s your job as the current manager to understand their work a little bit better.

And you can ask your team member, you can say, I think I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I managed an engineer in the past and I don’t have a background in computer science or engineering. And so what I had to do was I sat down with him and I asked him to talk me through, you know, what are some of the challenges in his work? What are the, some of the things that he feels really strong at?

I collected a lot of peer feedback in that case so that I’d understand, okay, how do others evaluate success of this work? So I did a little bit extra to make sure that I could adequately evaluate his work. And so if you feel like, well, I’m not really an expert. I don’t really know if they’re doing a good job. I think so. They’re telling me everything’s fine, but I’m not quite sure. Then we do want to do a little detective work so that we can make sure we’re supporting them the best we can.

Or if you have a lot of those folks, then I do think it’s time to hire a manager. If you have a set of folks and you feel like. From this kind of category over here, I don’t know if I can really assess the effectiveness of, of their work and I, and I want them to get more support. So that brings us to the fourth question. Is your team naturally broken down into departments or divisions? And so this is a great indicator of, yeah, if you have kind of three buckets of work, I was working with a business owner recently that had, you Kind of a marketing team.

She had an internal and operations team, and then she had like a content creation team for the core business. Well, those were three really clear national divisions where a manager would be really helpful because then it gives her three points of contact to, to navigate the strategy, to get feedback from the team, what’s going on, to really understand, you know, the, the, the direction of the business without having to go to all 10 team members. Now, the full company wasn’t large.

It was only 10 total, but in her case, because there was really clear lines of division and in departments, it made total sense to have three managers. She then works on a strategy with them and they oversee the rest of the team. Now there’s also situations where, you know, you might not really have clear delineations. Folks are working on multiple things. I do a little bit of operations, a little bit of marketing, a little bit of sales, right?

And in that case. Then no, you don’t have divisions. And the answer to that would be no. So it also might be a signal of, should I create different departments? What is the natural groupings of people? And that’s a conversation, if you’re curious about how we’d map that out, that I’d love to support you in. So send me an email, helloatLiagarvin. com. And we can work through that because I think actually creating some of that structure can really help people see, well, what is my career path?

Where can I go from here? And it can create some natural leadership opportunities for folks to oversee those departments. So if that’s something you’re like, well, what’s my org chart? Where should I be going? And you’re not quite sure. Send me an email. And that’s something we can talk about right away or schedule a free scale up strategy call because that’s exactly the kind of thing we work through. And you can schedule that on my website at Lia Garver.

com. So that question, does my team have natural departments divisions? You might not have them today. You might feel like you need them, but that’s another good indicator. If yes, Yeah. Having a managers or department leads across the board. That’s going to be really helpful. Last one. Are you struggling to scale yourself? And maybe the answer is like, yes, every day, always, of course. But what I mean by this one is, you know, are you finding that you’re needing to be out in the field more often?

I have a client that runs a really, really successful med spa, and that’s kind of focused on the biohacking space. And she wants to be out there in conferences, doing talks, really learning cutting edge technology to bring back to her med spot. And so in that case, she needed a set of managers that would be there in the center day to day really overseeing everything. Maybe you are finding yourself out there doing a lot of client service delivery.

Maybe you’re a consultant and you are continually, you know, traveling, doing workshops or different things like that for your clients and, and your team members don’t really have you on hand. I’ve seen the same happen with marketing agencies, PR agencies, where that business owner is really supporting, you know, growing what’s next and they’re having to be out there either doing that client management, business development, or delivery of services. For my managers in the corporate world, sometimes the answer to, are you struggling to scale yourself is, you know, am I really doing what I needed to do to be shaping the direction of this team or this product area or this strategy?

Like, am I dedicating enough time or am I being pulled in some of the weeds of day to day management where having another person dividing those responsibilities would be really helpful for me? Potentially, you are needing to do more work cross functionally, cross team, where you’re taught connecting across different divisions of your company. That’s going to take you away from the day to day, and it could be helpful to have a manager who’s helping translate some of that back to the team.

So these are the five questions I want you to run through when you’re assessing, is it the right time to hire another manager? When should I hire another manager? How do I know? Right? We want to ask ourselves. Am I managing more than 10 people or so where it’s hard for me to dedicate the time I need to, to really support the team? Does my team need a lot of one on one support or are they operating pretty autonomously?

Am I able to adequately assess the effectiveness of their work? Do I, do I really know how they’re doing? Third question, am I able to adequately assess their work? Fourth, is your team broken into national departments or divisions? And last question is, am I struggling to scale myself where I really need someone here dedicated to the team while I am looking up and outward? So with those five questions, then we come to a rough sense of, yeah, I think it’s time to hire that manager.

Next thing we got to do is to figure out exactly what we want that person to focus on. So write a really clear job description and to figure out how we are going to delegate a lot of the stuff that was on our plate. Because we had been managing those people probably beforehand. And that brings us to many other episodes of the podcast that I have. Actually, just last week, I talked about the answer to the question of, you know, what is this one question to ask ourselves to figure out how to delegate effectively and actually simplify the work we’re doing.

And that question, I’m gonna give you a spoiler because I already did an episode on it. That question is why am I performing this task? And especially if you are going to be handing off management responsibilities and there’s some different nuances to how you manage different folks because they had different, they needed different levels of support. There was nuances within their roles. That’s going to be really important information to translate to this new manager. right? Hey, this department over here, they have needed a little bit one on one support because they’re more junior.

So that is why answering that question. Why? That’s why I have this weekly review with this team, as opposed to this biweekly review, things like that. So we want to make sure when we are hiring that next manager, we are setting them up for success. And again, this comes down to clarity in the role description. It comes down to really making sure you’re delegating effectively and translating that why and, and, and then last, like letting them thrive, letting them step up, letting them lead.

So whenever we delegate something or when we get someone new to be a leader in our team, we want to allow them the space to be able to do things differently, to be able to help us grow our business. Right. Cause it’s not all about the way we would do it. And I know you know that, but I got to say it every time. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. And thank you for sending me the question because this is how I know what is really top of mind, what questions you want answered, what you’re really struggling with.

So if you have a question, always feel free to reach out. [email protected]. You can send me a direct message on Instagram, Lia. garvin or on LinkedIn. So any of those places, I will get the questions and I will do an episode on it or an ask me anything. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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