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18.08.05

SImons’ model explains the difficulties between managers and engineers

A few days ago, I wrote about Simons’ four spans of any job. As a quick reminder, Simons argues that in order to target high performance, any job or business unit must be in line with firstly the business’s strategy and secondly, the four spans must be balanced.

He then gives settings of the spans for a marketing and sales manager at a well-known company that develops and sells complex software for large corporate clients: ’The span of control for this job is quite narrow. As the manager stated, To do my day-to-day job, I depend on sales, sales consulting, competency groups, alliances, technical support, corporate marketing, field marketing, and integrated marketing communications. None of these functions reports to me, and most do not even report to my group. The span of accountability, by contrast, is wide. The manager is accountable, along with others throughout the business, for revenue growth, profit, and customer satisfaction — measures that require responsiveness and a willingness to make many trade-offs.’

Obviously, the span of influence is set wider than the span of control. To get things done, he has to ’cross boundaries and convince people in other units (whom he cannot command) to help him. So that the manager receives the help he needs, the CEO works hard to ensure that the job’s span of support is wide.’ I think this description explains very well the inherent difficulties sales managers and software developer often have: the sales manager can only be successful when an ethos of mutual responsibilities with shared goals, strong group identification and trust has benn build. However, this desirable setting mostly doesn’t exist. Rather, software engineers and sales managers don’t understand and respect each other, so that both fail in delivering consistent customer-satisfaction.

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