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General Questions and Comments

First, I want to say if this is already asked/answered somewhere, please point me there, happy to close this thread out and profit from previous discussion (but in my searching, I couldn't quite find something that addressed this...might be my searching inability though).

So, I'm a manager with a pretty diverse group of directs.  I'll sum up (although it's somewhat more complicated than I'll describe here, I'll try to hit the relevant points as simply as I can).  First, our organization is quite matrixed.  So, in my dozen or so directs, there are groups of 2-4 people that work on significantly related things, with one instance of an individual that works on a team based in a different geo that doesn't overlap much with the other members of my team.  Second, I have people that are managers as well as individual contributors, which isn't a BIG concern generally...except that the level of the people is quite varied.  Some of my individual contributors are *leads*, while others are quite new.  The main issue here is one of my *teams* really needs its own manager, but the team is fairly new to me, and there isn't currently anybody in a position to manage the team, so I'm still owning this team.  

So, if I were to try to make a few bullets that represent my team members:

  1. Manager of Team A (15-ish people in size)
  2. Manager of Team B (10-ish people in size)
  3. Direct, but a leader of Team C (the rest of Team C doesn't report to me)
  4. Team D
    1. Lead of Team D (but not at a point to be a manager, more of an owner of the product)
    2. Technical Lead of Team D
    3. Individual Contributor of Team D
  5. Individual Contributor of team E - lower level associate

My gut is telling me to break this into maybe 2 meetings.  

People in first meeting: (numbers from above) 1,2,3,4.1 (lead of Team D)

People in second meeting: 4 (all) and 5

There is some additional nuance that I think fits into the above scenario (I do have slightly over 10 directs, which isn't represented here, but some duplicate the concerns I've highlighted with the above scenario).

Input greatly appreciated!