Hire High-Agency People

McKinsey’s old best practice recommends four to six direct reports per manager. It was tuned to a specific model of management: the manager coaches each of their people, reviews the team’s work, and is involved in all decisions. Given the level of involvement required, four to six people is really the maximum you can feasibly manage. 

But we’re throwing that guidance out the window because we want to do the real work. 

What wide spans take off the table

We're building Serval faster than most companies have ever been built. We don't have time to coach people through their first year on the job in the way that traditional companies do. We need people who can pick up a workstream and run it. People who learn from their own work,  develop their judgment by exercising it, and don’t wait for their ideas to be validated from above.

When I have 10 or even 20+ direct reports, I can't run the McKinsey playbook. I can't coach in the traditional sense, the kind where you sit down weekly, walk through what someone did, and suggest how to do it differently next time. The math doesn't allow it. My time is better spent leaning in: thinking critically about strategy, setting plans in place that will transform our team, and rolling up my sleeves to do the work.

For leaders who thrive on impact and results, this kind of setup is energizing, invigorating, and a new challenge, but it does dramatically change how we hire. 

What we require: high-agency

High agency doesn't mean you never ask for input. It doesn't mean you never escalate. It means you have the judgment to know when to do either, because no one above you has the bandwidth to make that call for you. You have to have the taste to know what great work looks like, and you have to be able to ship something and trust that you got it close to right.

The kind of person who thrives in this system is rare. Most people, even very competent people, have built their careers under a manager who reviewed their work and gave them the answer when they were stuck. That model produces a lot of strong performers. It doesn't produce many people who can operate in a culture where the answer mostly isn't coming.

What you get in return: low hierarchy

This model also means you don't need to ask your manager for permission to talk to someone on another team or route a question up through the approval chain. You go directly to the person who owns the workstream you need input on. We call that person the DRI, the directly responsible individual, and the company runs on the assumption that whoever holds DRI on a problem is the right place to bring questions about it.

That sounds obvious until you've worked somewhere it isn't true. Most companies route the same conversation through three layers of management because no one trusts the most junior person enough to hand them DRI. We trust ours. The whole system depends on it.

In return, employees get more ownership over their work and the ability to actually make an impact. It allows the team to grow and approach problems in a way that isn’t possible with someone micromanaging you. 

For managers, rather than focusing on an endless cycle of reviews, they are part of the day-to-day shuffle as individual contributors. We’re freeing leaders, arguably the strongest contributors, to give their full selves to the business output.

When trust is the default, bringing in the right talent from the start is imperative.

Who fits here

We understand that this setup isn’t for everyone, nor should it be. 

The person who thrives here is the person who has been a standout performer at every job they've had and is now asking themselves a different question. Not "how do I hit my number." That number, they hit. The new questions are: “how do I break my own ceiling? How do I get twice as good as I was last year? How do I become the version of myself I didn't think I could be?”

If you're a rep who has hit 100% of quota every year of your career, the question we're asking you to answer at Serval is what it would take to hit 200% of your quota - and if you do, we will happily compensate you for that. If you're an engineer who has shipped reliably at every company you've been at, the question is the same. The system is built for the person who is excited by that question, not threatened by it.

The makings of a team that wins gold

The reason I run with this management setup is because that constraint, my limited time, produces the team I actually want.

I want to cultivate a team where every person is genuinely owning their work, and we trust our team enough where everyone can be a “directly responsible individual.” It’s a team where people look to each other for coaching and answers, not just their manager.  

That's the makings of a team that wins gold. It's also, I think, the only way to build the company we said we were going to build.