Our operations team has ballooned to thirty people, and our Operations Director is completely overwhelmed trying to manage technicians, scheduling, and client escalations directly. When and how should we tier seats beneath a leadership seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a leadership seat holder has more than seven direct reports, their span of control is broken. They spend their entire day answering tactical questions and putting out fires instead of focusing on strategic Rocks, Scorecard trends, and process improvement. When this happens, you must break the functional bottleneck by tiering seats beneath them.

Do not create intermediate tiers haphazardly. Start by analyzing the work flowing through the department. In operations, work generally divides into three distinct areas: technical execution, logistical scheduling and dispatch, and customer communication. If one director is trying to oversee all thirty frontline technicians while simultaneously handling customer complaints, accountability is diluted.

Create a second tier on your Accountability Chart directly below the Operations Director. Typically, this looks like establishing two or three focused managerial seats, such as Field Service Supervisor, Resource and Dispatch Manager, and Quality and Safety Lead. Each of these new seats must have its own five clearly defined roles, with LMA as role number one.

Evaluate your current frontline high-performers for GWC to see who can step into these supervisory seats. Be disciplined: do not promote your best technician into a supervisor seat unless they genuinely Get, Want, and have the Capacity to lead people. Once those seats are filled, your frontline staff report directly to those supervisors. The Operations Director now manages only those two or three leaders, freeing up significant capacity to focus on department-level Scorecards, gross margins, and continuous operational improvement.