No, there isn't a cultural difference.
1. If you want to discuss work items in a group setting with 22 people, it's an inefficient use of time.
2. If a manager has 22 direct reports, it becomes nearly impossible for them to do anything but manage, which make the whole team less efficient.
3. A manager ought to be expected to, and have time to, mentor their employees. This is impractical with such large teams, and the manager will always end up preferring just a couple at the expense of the rest.
4. Micromanagement is inefficient and unappreciated, but in such a large & flat team, it's very hard to ensure streamlined horizontal communication such that optimal decisions can always be made by ICs (or above them, managers).
5. There are two reasons organizational layers exist. The first is to allow domain specific experts to focus on their specialties in areas of the business that required dedicated staffing. The second is so the organization is setup to continuously mature over time. If you have a completely flat org almost entirely composed of IC SMEs, attrition will end up killing you because of the disjointedness and lack of corporate tribal knowledge creation you miss when you don't have functional teams. Note that the second piece almost always introduces some functional inefficiency in the org, but it is a reasonable risk mitigation practice for most companies.
Personally, I think "how is everything going" should be discussed at least every month, and with more casual check-ins that are more frequent than that, and task-based. I have high expectations for managers, and do expect that a significant portion of their time should be spent helping the people beneath them learn & grow.
1. If you want to discuss work items in a group setting with 22 people, it's an inefficient use of time.
2. If a manager has 22 direct reports, it becomes nearly impossible for them to do anything but manage, which make the whole team less efficient.
3. A manager ought to be expected to, and have time to, mentor their employees. This is impractical with such large teams, and the manager will always end up preferring just a couple at the expense of the rest.
4. Micromanagement is inefficient and unappreciated, but in such a large & flat team, it's very hard to ensure streamlined horizontal communication such that optimal decisions can always be made by ICs (or above them, managers).
5. There are two reasons organizational layers exist. The first is to allow domain specific experts to focus on their specialties in areas of the business that required dedicated staffing. The second is so the organization is setup to continuously mature over time. If you have a completely flat org almost entirely composed of IC SMEs, attrition will end up killing you because of the disjointedness and lack of corporate tribal knowledge creation you miss when you don't have functional teams. Note that the second piece almost always introduces some functional inefficiency in the org, but it is a reasonable risk mitigation practice for most companies.
Personally, I think "how is everything going" should be discussed at least every month, and with more casual check-ins that are more frequent than that, and task-based. I have high expectations for managers, and do expect that a significant portion of their time should be spent helping the people beneath them learn & grow.