When Capacity Becomes Overhead - Organisational Load, Span of Control and Team Design in Humanitarian Operations
Updated: Sep 23
Humanitarian organisations invest considerable time and energy determining what technical capacity a programme needs. They give considerably less attention to ensuring their organisational structures support programme delivery. What is often missing is a clear understanding of what success looks like, with organisational structures designed to achieve it.
At Gyroscope Strategic Advisory, we help organisations define their structures and operating systems, focusing on span of control (SOC), reducing organisational load and encouraging team autonomy. We help organisations focus on key objectives and build scalable team structures by grouping related tasks and capabilities.
The Hidden Costs of Technical Capacity – Organisational Load
Even the most well-thought-out human resource initiatives rarely achieve just one thing. In complex systems like organised groups of people, changes always have unintended effects. The first is the effect on team dynamics. The broader the management structure of a project team, the more interconnections there are, the greater the need for coordination, and the more effort that coordination takes.
More complex team dynamics also lead to resource competition. Each technical department is ultimately accountable for delivering its own objectives. This creates an inherent incentive to prioritise the resources that department needs, even when those resources could produce greater value elsewhere in the programme. The team leader’s ability to deal with these problems is further degraded as their span of control is overstretched. These issues can be grouped under the concept of organisational load.
Organisational load refers to the burden created by management, coordination, communication and support requirements of an organisational function or structure.
This leads to the question: does the additional organisational load generated by technical capacity outweigh its operational value? One way increasing organisational load manifests is through a stretched SOC.
The Span of Control
The SOC refers to how many people a manager can supervise effectively. The ratio of management to reports varies with task complexity, the skills of the manager and their subordinates, and the amount of work the manager is expected to produce outside their management activities. This means that SOCs can be as narrow as 1:3 for teams that serve diverse functions or require extensive coaching or sparring. They can also be as broad as 1:15 or more for more homogeneous or autonomous tasks.
However, humanitarian organisations rarely speak of SOC. They often seek to add technical resources to improve service provision and enable capacity building, overlooking manageability. This technical capacity may come in the form of cash program experts, protection specialists or a broad range of medical professionals, to name a few.
However, adding technical capacity is not without costs.
Often, after identifying a technical problem, a specialist manager is added under a middle manager to address it. As the middle manager accumulates reports, their attention and capacity become stretched until their SOC is overwhelmed.
An effective SOC is essential for efficient organisational systems. When a manager supervises too many people, direct reports receive insufficient support, team coordination requires more effort, and the manager has little time to work on deeper cross-cutting issues. Conversely, if the SOC is too low and team focus is too narrow, we have high management for relatively low output.
A Technical Tangle in The Central African Republic
In the Central African Republic, a large hospital project I was overseeing had a similarly large management team. This was particularly visible in the medical team. While it is reasonable to assume that the largest team in a medical organisation would be the medical team, expanding the span of control to the point where the medical team leader had twelve direct reports, many of whom needed significant coaching, went too far.
This was largely because it was believed all technical specialties required a department and a manager. This included one nurse manager for the overall hospital and another specifically for the operating theatre. We had one midwife manager for the sexual and reproductive health program and another for the sexual violence activities. Often, these managers had one supervisor beneath them and a limited number of reports across the bottom of the management pyramid.
There were three main reasons for these decisions:
Headquarters advisory positions insisting on the importance of their respective domains and needs for HR needs.
An unwillingness to review organisational structure and a certain rigidity about work function contracting and salary levels.
The additive nature of human problem-solving and the assumption that more means better and that one plus one equals two.
Management Problem
What resulted was an unmanageable medical team. Prioritisation was difficult; managers under the team leader competed with support departments such as logistics and administration for resources; the medical team leader could not provide sufficient coaching; and friction developed within the medical team. No one evaluated whether an additional manager and department-level support would help or would stretch the team leader’s attention. Finally, support departments such as logistics and administration had too few resources to keep up with the medical team’s many uncoordinated demands.
Solution
The medical team decided it needed to define an organisational structure and SOC for the team leader to better coordinate efforts and resources and advance their key objectives. We quickly decided to consolidate the two nursing manager positions into one, and service delivery continued without a hitch.
However, other departments did not go so smoothly. It was recognised that sexual and reproductive health and sexual violence activities were insufficient to merit their own respective managers. However, the separate departments were kept but were now overseen by supervisor-level positions which reported to the same medical team leader. Effectively, the span-of-control issue worsened, as the activity leads now required additional direct coaching. This shows us that recognising the structural problem is easier than solving it, especially if your organisation has strict HR structures, control-cycle-based decision-making, or donor requirements.
Principle and Lesson
The key principle is that highly specialised, though unwieldy, teams often compete for resources, have low autonomy and poor coordination, and incur a high organisational load. The organisation accepted the cost of technical capacity without sufficiently considering whether it justified the management and coordination burden it created.
Scaling Logistics in Syria.
Working in North-East Syria, just following the defeat of ISIS in Raqqa, presented numerous opportunities for a humanitarian organisation and a different managerial example to the situation in CAR. The decision was made to launch two new projects. The issue was that, at the time, budgets did not allow for extensive additional human resources. The medical teams had already been formed, though there was insufficient administrative and logistical staff to support the required scale-up.
Management Problem
I was recruited to manage the logistical and administrative teams of both projects. Ultimately, this was incredibly challenging in the short term and unsustainable for the long term. The challenge was that administration and logistics require different skill sets, and we needed to build new structures and systems; on top of designing the program, the teams were staffed with people new to the organisation who needed training.
Solution
We decided to maintain shared support for the two projects. However, both projects needed additional technical capacity for logistics and administration. We separated the departments, assigning a logistics team leader and an administrative manager to each, who in turn supported both projects. Separating the roles into scalable departments enabled a massive increase in workload while retaining technical capacity.
Principle and Lesson
Some might argue this problem was less complex than the example from CAR. However, the principle remains relevant: building scalable, task-based teams enabled autonomy, resource pooling and more effective coordination to achieve project objectives.
It is imperative to ensure that managers can group several technical lines around a focus point or objective.
As task complexity grows, we need to redefine roles and responsibilities in novel ways. Otherwise, we get trapped in rigid structures, where adding technical capacity creates unmanageable organisational load.
Managing Organisational Load in More Complex Teams
For more complex teams with multiple sub-teams, you cannot add technical capacity haphazardly. You need to group technical capacity into teams that require the closest collaboration and coordination. Team structures should maintain a manageable SOC that allows sufficient time for coaching, coordination and cross-cutting management, while retaining enough capacity to scale.
Therefore, the solution must be:
Define the capability required - Identify the technical capacities necessary to achieve the programme’s objectives.
Build scalable teams - Group functions around logical tasks, coordination requirements, and required capabilities under team leaders, respecting the SOC.
Scale capacity – Find ways to retain technical capacity within objective-focused teams. This may require adapting management roles, levels and responsibilities, or rearranging team groupings as necessary.
The diagrams below illustrate how to apply this principle.
The diagram above could represent different levels of abstraction. This could refer to an individual team, a countrywide program or an organisation. Team leaders maintain manageability by bringing together several technical experts around a focus point. This could be a technical requirement, a geographical area or a delimitable activity. The diagram below shows a second variation in which teams can have more autonomy, departing from traditional command structures.
Team composition can also shift over time. Logical task groupings ensure teams absorb complexity rather than reproduce it. Our simple example from Syria displayed this point. While this principle is harder to apply with highly specialised teams working in heterogeneous programmes, it is essential for managing organisational load.
Design the structure around the work—not the work around the structure.
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