Span of control and how much hands-on work managers still do

Across more than 92,000 teams in 104 organisations, Gallup found in 2025 that a manager has 12.1 direct reports on average, against 10.9 a year earlier and almost half as many again as at the first measurement in 2013. Almost all managers also do hands-on work of their own; the median is forty per cent of their time. Korn Ferry hears from 42 per cent of organisations that they cut management roles in the past year, and from 39 per cent of employees that they feel rudderless without a manager.

The interesting part is the threshold Gallup found. If a manager stays below that forty per cent of own work, the team stays engaged, however large it is. Above it, engagement falls as the team grows. What makes the difference is easy to name: seven in ten people who have a real conversation with their manager every week are engaged; without that conversation, one in four. A manager with twelve direct reports and forty per cent own work has no hours left for those conversations.

Taken together, the figures show that a workable span of control depends on how much work of their own the manager still carries. See also the briefing Engagement and workload of managers and their teams; this is the arithmetic behind it.

Albert Heijn describes the same bottleneck on the shop floor. In an interview published by Ahold Delhaize in September 2026, Noortje van Genugten of Albert Heijn says store managers lose a lot of time to the computer and email. They process information and results and turn them into tasks for their staff. The chain is exploring how AI agents could take over this work, giving managers more time to coach staff and look after customers. This is an intention of the company itself, with no measurement of the effect.

In software, LeadDev finds that managers’ own hands-on work is growing again. In the Engineering Leadership Report 2026, a survey of six hundred technical leaders, 35 per cent of engineering managers were doing more hands-on technical work than a year earlier, against 20 per cent in 2025. Among CTOs, 44 per cent spent more time coding and reviewing code themselves. According to the leaders interviewed, AI makes it easier to contribute directly again. LeadDev does not measure how much of their time this takes, so whether these managers exceed Gallup’s forty per cent threshold remains an open question.

How solid is the evidence? The Gallup series spans twelve years and the 2025 measurement covers more than ninety thousand teams. The layers have already gone; this is not a forecast but the current state of play.