I don’t like the specific description of levels of hierarchy for reasons I’m not quite certain about. This is at least partly just the phrasing, not the deeper point.
One piece of this is that, as is mentioned in some other comments, not every level of management has the same size. For example, if I regularly speak with my manager’s manager and they have both explicit awareness of the object level work I do and share some responsibility for the outcome of that work, are they really two levels above me? What if I only talk to them once a month? Once a quarter? There may be some calculus that one can use to compute whether these count as 2 levels or 1.27 levels, but it seems like it has a strong interaction with the other criteria, such as how much slack I’m given, whether excellence is measurable, and who has skin in the game.
Maybe this is an optimistic take based on good luck with the team I currently work on, but my expectation is that usually there will be more levels of hierarchy than there are levels of non-interaction; that is, I expect most actual ranked titles to correspond to 1⁄2 or less of a level of hierarchy, which makes it a bit difficult to measure the depth of an organization.
Maybe this is just pessimistic of me though, and it’s easy to find an up to date, readable org chart when joining an organization? That doesn’t match my experience though.
Anyway I don’t really feel satisfied that I’ve found my true objection but maybe this will help someone else or future me identify something.
I don’t like the specific description of levels of hierarchy for reasons I’m not quite certain about. This is at least partly just the phrasing, not the deeper point.
One piece of this is that, as is mentioned in some other comments, not every level of management has the same size. For example, if I regularly speak with my manager’s manager and they have both explicit awareness of the object level work I do and share some responsibility for the outcome of that work, are they really two levels above me? What if I only talk to them once a month? Once a quarter? There may be some calculus that one can use to compute whether these count as 2 levels or 1.27 levels, but it seems like it has a strong interaction with the other criteria, such as how much slack I’m given, whether excellence is measurable, and who has skin in the game.
Maybe this is an optimistic take based on good luck with the team I currently work on, but my expectation is that usually there will be more levels of hierarchy than there are levels of non-interaction; that is, I expect most actual ranked titles to correspond to 1⁄2 or less of a level of hierarchy, which makes it a bit difficult to measure the depth of an organization.
Maybe this is just pessimistic of me though, and it’s easy to find an up to date, readable org chart when joining an organization? That doesn’t match my experience though.
Anyway I don’t really feel satisfied that I’ve found my true objection but maybe this will help someone else or future me identify something.