You might have optimized for autonomy. You likely forgot to optimize for presence.
This week at START Summit: A panel about leading from presence vs. leading from pain.
What You Will Learn:
Why "span of control" is a relic of industrial thinking — and what to replace it with
The difference between a team that runs on trust and one that runs on relationship
A 3-question audit to find where you are the real bottleneck
The Story: The Question Behind The Question
One year ago, my piece on Jensen Huang's 60 direct reports struck a nerve. The response confirmed what many of you feel: trapped between outdated management dogma and the pressure to lead differently.
The conversation surfaced a deeper question: "If not 7, and not 60, what is the right number?"
Then I read a sharp take in The Economist that addressed this directly. There is no optimal number, it argued. The ideal span of control simply "depends" — on complexity, talent, culture, the energy of the manager.
The analysis is impeccable… but I found it a little unsatisfying.
Why? It describes the symptoms of a high-functioning organization rather than the root cause. "It depends" is the right answer to the wrong question. The conversation is about the architecture of trust and care, not about the “mechanics” of control.
The Insight: Three Spans, One That Actually Matters
Most leadership thinking stops at span of control. A few have moved to span of trust. Almost none have asked the harder question underneath both.
Span of Control asks: how many people can I personally direct, review, and correct? It's a relic of industrial management — rooted in oversight, built on the assumption that value comes from intervention. It's about managing people.
Span of Trust asks: how many people can operate autonomously because they have clarity on goals, context, and decision rights? This is better. It's the architecture of a well-designed system. Reinhard Sprenger captures it precisely: "In the context of increasingly flat hierarchies, the word 'control' must probably detach itself from the 'span' and be replaced by the 'span of trust.'"
But here's what span of trust doesn't tell you: it can be built entirely with structure. Clear OKRs, documented processes, well-designed decision frameworks. It is, if we're honest, sophisticated coordination — a cold system that works without anyone really showing up for anyone else. People can feel the difference between a system that is designed for them and a person who actually cares about them.
Which brings us to the question almost no leadership framework asks: Span of Care.
Not how many people can operate without you. But how many people can you genuinely be present for — not as a function, but as a human being? How many relationships can you actually sustain, invest in, and show up for with real attention?
This is where biology enters the conversation. Robin Dunbar's research shows our brains are built for roughly 150 stable relationships — with a much smaller inner circle (5-7 relationships) of genuine closeness. Span of care is not a leadership philosophy but a cognitive and emotional capacity limit. It is finite. And pretending otherwise is where leadership quietly breaks down.
The leverage point is this: most leadership failures aren't failures of strategy or system. They are failures of capacity — leaders who have built a wide span of trust but a hollow span of care, and whose teams feel the difference every day.
Your Quick Win: The 3-Question Span Audit
Spend five minutes this week with a pen and paper. Answer these honestly — not for your team, but for yourself.
The Clarity Question: If you disconnected completely for two weeks, how many of your direct reports would make the exact same priority calls you would have made? A low number means you've built dependence on your judgment, not on shared understanding.
The Trust Question: How many decisions landed on your desk last week because of a gap in process or permission — not because your specific expertise was required? Each one is a structural bottleneck you've chosen to keep.
The Care Question: For how many of your direct reports do you know what is genuinely hard for them right now — not professionally, but as a person? If the answer is fewer than half, your span of care has shrunk below your span of trust. That gap is where engagement quietly dies.
At Bachmann Catalyst, we help CEOs of scaling companies (100-1,000 employees) navigate complexity with clarity – integrating strategy, leadership architecture, and personal mastery to build businesses that matter without burning out.
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