One is the weirdest number of people to manage

Or, how to garden with a single plant

When someone on your team shows interest in people leadership, an obvious move is to give them a single report for a time, so they can try it out, dip a toe in the water. It’s a big shift, after all. I’ve done this myself in the past, but from many coaching conversations I’ve had, I think it might be counterproductive.

If you’re managing one person, that means you are spinning up a full management operating system (1:1s, workload coordination, career conversations, and doing everything your company asks of managers) for a single person. It’s like setting up a whole garden, then planting a single plant.

This situation can arise for structural reasons (people movements create one-person teams as a side-effect), or with the best intentions (the idea that managing one person is of course easier than managing any larger number).

If you find yourself in this situation, or if you’ve helped to set up this situation for someone else, I see you, and I’ve been there. But I want to say it’s going to take a lot of extra work from everyone involved to make the situation a productive one.

In this post, I want to provide some ideas for reframing the situation and transcending the extra work involved in single-person teams.

What it’s like

With one report, every management signal is a sample size of n=1. If something feels off, you’ve got no way to calibrate or triangulate. People managing one other person might ask themselves:

• how can I be objective? how can I be fair?
• is this issue about them or about me, or about our context?
• what is the difference between aligning with my report, supporting them, or colluding with them?
• should it be this much effort? how can I make it more productive?

Leadership is often about bringing certainty to uncertainty, but the kind of uncertainty that’s based on statistically-meaningless data doesn’t lend itself to decision-making. This sets things up to increase confusion and anxiety in both manager and report. I dare say this experience reinforces the skepticism great engineers have about becoming great managers.

With two or three reports, on the other hand, you get:

• calibration: you can tell whether an issue is about one person or about you.
• differentiation: you can hone that vital leadership sense of being able—and knowing when—to stand apart from the pack.
• culture: You can watch how people work with each other and shape the dynamics between them. You can build a sense of belonging and small rituals that bring people together.
• a sense of your effort amplified: as growing adults, and as engineers, we want to feel our impact increasing, like force amplifiers.

What if I’m the manager of one person?

You’re not imagining it. Gardening with one plant is 80% of the effort of gardening with a full garden, and it’s totally normal to feel like the effort you spend isn’t bearing the fruit it should be.

So what can you do?

• Name it to yourself. The extra effort and thanklessness is structural, not personal. You’re not bad at this; you’re doing the weirdest, most unsettling, version of the role.
• Ease off the watering. The N=1 setup creates hypervigilance to every data point. When you’ve only got one plant, the temptation is to hover, check the soil every day, rotate it, repot it. The plant would do better with a bit less attention and a bit more trust in the conditions you’ve already set up. Notice yourself over-reacting and over-supporting. Ask yourself what it would look like to under-react—leave more of the problem-holding to your report, and give yourself more of a break!
• Find your own calibration. Seek out peers who manage people (especially other new leads) and compare notes.
• Have a keystone conversation with your report to design your working relationship. In a team, culture emerges from the group, and the manager shapes dynamics rather than inventing them. In an n=1 setup, there is no group; the manager-report relationship is the culture. This relationship deserves to be explicitly designed, rather than left to chance.
• Get some coaching. I know, I would say that. But if you’ve got no team to ground you, and your manager has their own lens on things, then coaching is a place you can take your “is it them or me?” questions, to get an answer that’s all about you.
• Ask your manager to be explicit about the plan. “When does this grow?” or “what needs to be true for a second report?” which gives you a horizon. Without one, the stepping stone starts looking like a plateau.
• Look for places to practice the team-shaping skills. Facilitate a guild, run a working group, lead a cross-team thing. Develop the skills a single report cannot teach you.

What if I’m the manager of an n=1 manager?

First of all, thanks for reading! You’re in the best position to relieve the effort this structure creates.

“But it limits the blast radius”

You might be thinking, “the reason I’m giving someone one report is because they’re not sure, and I’m not sure, how it’ll go. If it doesn’t go well, this approach reduces the collateral damage.”

What you have set up here, my friend, *taps soil off gloves* is a self-watering prophecy. You’ve put someone in the hardest version of the role, with the least structural support, and the fewest signals to learn from. Then if they struggle, it confirms the fear that justified the constraint. You have set up a garden with one plant, and given it a small pot because it might not flourish anyway.

And if it doesn’t work out, nobody will come out of it with a clear signal on why it didn’t work, because the set-up has all these uncertainties built in.

So see if you can unhook caution from care. If you genuinely think someone has untapped potential to succeed, the caring move is to provide clearer challenge with more support, not less exposure.

So what can I do as manager of the manager?

If it’s within your power, remedy the situation. If you support your n=1 manager to become a leader, increase the generosity of your support by making their team n>1.

If that leaves you as an n=1 manager, then great! You already have the experience and knowledge to handle the uncertainty, and you’ve just freed up more capacity for your own growth. You’ve demonstrated to your manager you’re ready for bigger things.

If you can’t put more people on this team for whatever reason, then:

• Say it out loud. Tell them that you see managing one person is weird and hard, that it is a structural thing, and that it says nothing about whether they’re cut out for this. You see the thought they’re putting into it and the good work they’re doing. Many people won’t figure that out on their own, they’ll just assume they’re bad at it, and you can help ground them.
• Have a plan, and share it. “Here’s when I expect this to grow” or “here’s what needs to be true for a second report” gives the needed clarity. If you don’t have that clarity, you’re plateauing them.
• Be their calibration partner. N=1 managers can’t pattern-match across reports, so share what you know about the patterns you see. Talk about what you’re seeing in your own experience and your own 1:1s.
• Support them to give themselves a break. N=1 managers often manage really hard. You can coach them to ease off on things that aren’t feeling productive, to shift more responsibility for the relationship to their report, allow mistakes, and so on.
• Connect them with other leads. Other new leads and other experienced leads. Managing one person is isolating, and a fortnightly chat with peers can do more than most training programmes.
• Give them somewhere to practice the n>1 team-shaping skills. Let them facilitate a guild, run a working group, a side-project, lead a cross-team thing.

What if I’m the 1 in n=1?

It can feel weird being someone’s only report. You might notice your manager seems overly invested in your work, or oddly hesitant to give you direct feedback. That’s likely not about them or you. The system is doing that to both of you.

A few things that might help:

• Ask your manager what they’re finding hard. Not in a loaded way. Just: “what’s useful feedback for me, and what’s more to do with the shape of the team right now?” This opens space to talk about your working relationship, to help you both calibrate. Again, a keystone conversation might be a useful frame for you both to calibrate with each other.
• Build your own peer network. Your manager can’t give you the culture that comes from working alongside others. Find it in guilds, working groups, or cross-team work. Don’t wait to be invited.
• Don’t over-index on your manager’s responses. When you’re the only data point, their mood or their reactions to you carry more weight than they should. Some of what feels personal is actually structural.

Closing

If we want more people to choose leadership, their first experience of it probably shouldn’t be the weirdest version, with the least support. Take a bigger chance. If you’re already in that spot, you can do a lot more than you might think to move it from survivable to thriveable.

If you want to start a conversation with someone about n=1 managing, it might help to send them this article as an opener.

If you’re an n=1 manager, you might send it to your manager with, “This describes some of what I’ve been experiencing. Could we talk about what’s possible?”

If you manage an n=1 manager, you might send it to them with, “Do you experience any of these unintended effects? Let’s figure out how to fix them if so.”

If you’re the one person on the team, you might send it to your manager with, “I found this interesting. Does any of it ring true for you?”

PS n=1 teams happen here, too, and they’re just as weird: