As a CIO, I have learned that without a real layer of leaders underneath me, the role becomes hard to sustain. The symptoms are familiar to me, and probably to many other CIOs. Too many decisions still travel upward. Delivery issues arrive late and badly framed. People matters become executive matters. A week that was meant for architecture, hiring, or alignment with the business ends up consumed by operating noise.
This is often described as a time problem. I see it more as an organization problem. The first layer under me determines how much of the company’s complexity can be handled before it reaches my desk. When that layer is thin, weak, or unclear, I become the place where unresolved questions collect.
That creates a predictable outcome: I have less time to think, less time to shape direction, and less energy for the parts of the role that only I can do.
Research points in the same direction. A 2022 study in Public Administration Review, based on hospital data from Denmark, found that employees observed more leadership behaviour and reported higher job satisfaction under medium spans of control than under narrow or broad ones. The point is not that every technology organization should copy the same ratio. The point is that organizational design affects whether leadership is actually felt by teams.
That matters to me because the N-1 layer is where organization design becomes real.
The work that should stop climbing upward
A strong N-1 layer does not remove my need to stay close to the business. It changes the level at which I operate. There is a difference between being informed and being pulled into the middle of everything. In many technology organizations, that line gets blurred. Leaders hold titles, but not real authority. Domain ownership exists on paper, while the difficult trade-offs still end up in the same office.
That arrangement may hold for a while, especially when the person at the top is experienced and willing to carry the load. It does not age well. Over time, teams learn what the real system is. They learn which decisions can be taken locally and which ones still need to be pushed upward. They learn whether managers are there to lead or to relay. They learn whether escalation is the exception or the normal route.
Once that pattern is set, it is very hard to speak seriously about strategy. Strategy needs continuity of attention. It needs time to compare options, pressure-test assumptions, and stay close to the business without being trapped in every internal loop.
What the research suggests
The evidence on spans of control is not simplistic, and that is useful in itself. Gallup’s 2026 work on manager team size argues that there is no universal ideal span of control; manager talent and time allocation matter a great deal. That is a sensible warning against copying benchmarks without looking at the actual shape of the work.
It also reinforces a practical point for CIOs. The issue is not just how many direct reports there are. The issue is whether those people have the judgment, room, and management capacity to absorb complexity without passing it on too early. Gallup has also long argued that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement across business units. That figure should make any executive pause. It suggests that the quality of the management layer is not a soft cultural topic sitting at the edge of performance. It is one of the main ways performance is produced in the first place.
For me, that has a direct implication. If the leaders below me are weak, overloaded, or underdeveloped, the consequences do not stop at morale. They show up in speed, decision quality, retention, and in my own ability to work at the right altitude.
What a good N-1 layer looks like
The best N-1 leaders reduce noise without hiding reality. They can frame a problem before raising it. They can make trade-offs inside clear boundaries. They can handle people issues as managers, not just as senior individual contributors with a larger title. They know when to escalate and when not to.
Just as important, they own outcomes rather than fragments. A leader responsible for engineering delivery should not merely coordinate status. A leader responsible for platform reliability should not just surface incidents. A leader responsible for security should not act as a messenger between tools, teams, and the CIO. These roles need real operational and managerial weight.
This is where many technology organizations hesitate. They create senior roles, but keep too much of the authority above them. They want accountability without accepting a degree of independence. They want leaders who think for themselves, but remain uncomfortable when those leaders make calls without checking first.
That hesitation is costly. It fills the leadership layer with capable people who cannot fully lead.
Time follows structure
I often hear senior leaders talk about protecting time. The phrase is accurate, but incomplete.
Time is protected by structure before it is protected by discipline.
I can clean up my calendar, shorten meetings, block focus time, or become harder to reach. All of that may help. Yet if the organization still routes too many decisions upward, the gains will be temporary. The system will keep reclaiming the time.
Research on executive time use makes the same point from another angle. Harvard Business School highlighted findings from a study of CEO time showing that effective CEOs operate with a deliberate personal agenda and devote a substantial share of their time to it, rather than letting the role become fully reactive. The details concern CEOs, but the lesson travels well: senior leadership requires planned attention, and planned attention only survives when the surrounding structure supports it.[web:53]
In my experience, the surrounding structure is often the N-1 layer. If that layer works, strategy becomes part of the weekly rhythm. If it does not, strategy slips into the margins.
The hard part
Strengthening the layer below me is rarely just a hiring exercise. Sometimes it is about changing roles. Sometimes it is about clarifying domains that have stayed fuzzy for too long. Sometimes it is about developing managers who were promoted for technical excellence but have not yet learned to lead with enough range. Sometimes it is about removing people who are decent operators but cannot carry the level of ambiguity the role now requires.
It also asks something uncomfortable of me. A stronger N-1 layer means some decisions will be made without my direct involvement. Some judgments will be made differently. Some problems will be solved in ways I would not have chosen myself.
That is not a sign that control has been lost. In many cases, it is a sign that leadership capacity is finally being built.
A more useful test
I use a simple test to judge whether the layer below is doing its job. Look at the last four weeks. How many of the matters that reached me should reasonably have been owned, framed, or resolved one level lower? How many meetings existed only because authority was still unclear? How many interruptions came from issues that had no obvious home except “up”?
The answers usually tell the story. A strong N-1 layer gives a technology organization more than managerial neatness. It gives it a better chance of staying coherent as it grows. It also gives me something less visible, but just as important: the time and headspace to lead on purpose.
