Relationship budgets

Seth Godin recently posted about Dunbar's Number, which is the number of productive relationships most people can generally maintain at any given time, essentially a relationship budget. The number is about 150, despite social networking's attempts to convince us that we have 400, 1000, 2500 "friends."

This got me thinking about organizational design and how a relationship budget could be applied to leaders in a large organization.

Take an executive and give him a budget of 150 relationships. 10 go to his family (spouse, kids, parents, siblings, etc.). Another 10 go to personal friends. If he has been around for a while, he has networking contacts to maintain as well, maybe 50 throughout his industry. That leaves 80 for his job, of which another 30 are devoted to peers and bosses, leaving 50 for subordinates...his span of control. (Note that all numbers here are arbitrary, but the central concept of a limited number of relationships is independently valid.)


The span of control will not only consider direct reports, but also those reporting to them. This means that if you lead an organization larger than this, you will not have a relationship with everyone. Additionally, they will not have a relationship with you.

What are the implications of all this rambling?

• Consider spans of control in light of productive relationships during organizational design.
• If leading an organization larger than you can directly relate to, deliberately and continuosly monitor the transfer of information and the transfer of relationships down the line.
• If you use up your relationship budget at work, there will be nothing left outside. Beware the curse of the workaholic.
• Do not over-reach. Trying to expand too far past your relationship budget will cause everything to collapse.

Are there other implications?  Have you seen this concept used well or poorly in your experience?