How can I manage a growing team?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I'm the admin assistant of the CTO and our organization has recently experienced a lot of growth. Within six months, we have merged with another organization and our Dev team has grown from 8 to 16, with another 8 people in QA.

What we're dealing with now is a highly technical individual, with little patience, managing a much larger team than he's accustomed to, 40% of which is junior as well as an increase in the number of projects. Needless to say, my boss is being pulled in too many directions at once. How can I help him manage his workload and his team so that the team feels they're getting enough help and support and remain effective?

manpreet 2 years ago

1. Talk with your boss about whether he could delegate any of his work. He doesn't have to create permanent levels of middle-management; can he appoint a tech lead for each key project and let those people handle the day-to-day stuff?

2. Try to identify tasks that could be off-loaded entirely, and candidates within the organization who could do them. When my current company was small the engineering manager interviewed all candidates; as we grew that became unworkable, and now we have a few developers who are in charge of the interviewing, with permission to draw in others as needed, and the manager interviews only the most-senior, business-affecting candidates. Identify the things "like that" in your organization, the things your boss is involved in "because he always has been" rather than "because he needs to be", and help find other ways to get those things done.