According to Workday, the average span of control right now is around the 12 mark. With the change to 20 for Senior Directors down and 15 for VPs and up, around 35% of the current leadership will either move to IC or be made redundant. It can't be managed by simply "shuffling deckchairs," as some on this page have suggested. Probably 1500 managers will be impacted, right the way from M8 through M11 and into Es.
Next week will be interesting.
Individual contributors today, on the layoff list tomorrow. Go work for the competition and stick it to them.
90% of the managers at Dell are just a waste of space. All they do is take IC status and push it up the chain.
You'll know they really mean business if spans and layers gets applied to marketing/product managers. In my 20+ years there most of them had about 3-4 direct reports.
If they ousted Sudhir, they will oust anybody
Some VPs are leaving, presumably because of spans. It's not just M8 to M11.
I wondered why in January my manager left the role for an IC in the field. They loved being a leader but if this was the plan to cut leaders they might have heard and jumped ship early. They had said, I'm not going anywhere before it happened too to try and keep us calm about all the pending layoffs. Thats so shıtty.
I think the application of these spans will be tailored and phased in over time. This won’t be implemented company wide next week, it isn’t practically possible the way I see it.
It's comical that directors with no tech skills will be made I10s and kept in employment
How many of layers of status repeaters do you really need?
You can’t compress leadership spans that drastically without major fallout. This isn’t just a restructure, it’s a strategic purge. Pushing M8–M11 into IC roles or out the door entirely will ripple across the org. The idea that this is just “deckchair shuffling” wildly underestimates the scale.
I do genuinely feel for those affected. People have worked long and hard on their career to move forward to only be pushed back.
It also has to be said, there are many in positions of director or manager that should never have been given that role and it is making right what was wrong.