The Collapsing Role of Middle Management

What flattening exposes is not what everyone assumes.

Middle management is being removed from large organisations at a pace with no recent precedent.

Gallup’s span-of-control data shows the average number of people reporting to a single manager has risen by close to fifty per cent since the firm began measuring it in 2013. Within just the last year, that figure moved from 10.9 to 12.1, a smaller step, but one taken from an already widened base.

Gartner named this shift as far back as October 2024, predicting that one in five organisations would use AI to eliminate more than half their middle management positions by the end of this year.¹ Independent tracking since then suggests the real pace may be running ahead of that estimate.

Manager headcount has already fallen 6.1 per cent since May 2022, and 41 per cent of employees now report their own company has already cut management layers.²

The pattern is public and named, and specific to management layers rather than headcount in general.

Amazon has removed 14,000 corporate management roles and told its remaining leaders to widen their spans of control.

Coinbase has capped itself at five layers between chief executive and individual contributor.

Block’s Jack Dorsey has argued publicly that no organisation needs a permanent middle management layer at all.

Volkswagen’s own proposed restructuring, still contested by its supervisory board at the time of writing, includes cutting leadership positions from roughly 21,500 to 16,000, a management delayering attempted in public, in real time, against active resistance.

What is actually being removed

The official explanation is coordination overhead. Scheduling, status reporting, performance monitoring, the administrative core of many management roles, is exactly the kind of work AI now performs cheaply.

McKinsey’s research found less than thirty per cent of a typical manager’s time was spent on genuine people leadership, with the remainder consumed by individual execution and administrative tasks now vulnerable to automation.

That explanation is convenient. It is also incomplete.

Communication and coordination used to be expensive. Layers of management existed partly because no single executive could track more than a handful of people without losing signal. Translating decisions downward through an organisation required intermediaries simply to make the information physically travel. That constraint is what built the pyramid in the first place, not necessarily the judgement performed at each level of it.

AI has made that constraint largely disappear. What is being exposed, as a result, is how much of middle management’s actual function was never judgement at all. It was translation, aggregation, and the administrative cost of moving information through a hierarchy built for a world where doing so any other way was not possible.

Once coordination becomes almost free, organisations stop paying primarily for coordination. They begin paying for judgement.

That single shift is what the rest of this article is really about. Middle management is not the story. It is simply the first place the deeper restructuring has become impossible to ignore.

The insight is not new. What is new is the speed and scale at which it is now being tested.

The uncomfortable question this leaves standing

For any individual currently occupying that layer, the question this exposes is not whether flattening is fair. It is happening regardless of what anyone believes about it. 

The real question is narrower and harder to avoid: once the coordination function is gone, what remains that a flatter, AI-assisted structure still needs.

The capabilities that survive are not the same capabilities that built most management careers. To understand why, the whole pattern has to be seen first.

Some of what middle management provided was never reducible to coordination. Newsweek quoted Dr. Shannon Franklin, a psychologist specialising in workplace wellbeing, observing that middle managers are typically the ones interpreting the emotional impact of organisational change for their teams. 

That is real value. It is also not evenly distributed. Some managers built it. Others did not, because the role never required them to.

Two directions of risk

The redistribution this creates runs two ways at once, and both carry genuine danger.

Executives absorbing wider spans of control are being pulled toward operational and specialist judgement that used to sit with the layer beneath them. An executive overseeing decisions that once passed through several intermediate layers of context and interpretation is now closer to detail they may not have the grounding to read correctly. 

Widening a span of control does not automatically widen the discernment required to use it well.

Beneath that, the mechanism that builds sound judgement over a career is thinning from both ends at once. 

Stanford research, reported by CBS News, found entry-level employment in the most AI-exposed fields has fallen 13 per cent since late 2022, rising to nearly 20 per cent in the hardest-hit fields of software engineering and customer service.

Middle management, the layer that once trained, mentored, and quality-checked that entry-level work, is being removed at the same time. The layer that cultivated judgement, and the layer that once grew into it, are being cut in the same cycle.

Neither loss shows up cleanly on a balance sheet. Forrester’s 2026 Future of Work research found 55 per cent of employers already regret AI-attributed layoffs, yet most are not correcting the mistake openly.

Forrester predicts roughly half will be quietly rehired, offshore, at lower salaries, or under different titles, rather than admitted as an error. What was removed is being replaced, quietly, once its absence becomes impossible to ignore.

Where the two directions meet

Described separately, these look like two different problems. They are not. They are the same collision, viewed from opposite sides.

Executives absorbing wider spans of control are being pulled downward into territory that used to belong to domain experts, closer to technical and specialist detail they once relied on someone else to hold.

At the same time, the experts and specialists who remain are being pulled upward, forced to exercise organisational judgement and political navigation that used to be filtered through the management layer now missing above them.

The buffer that used to separate the two, translating one language into the other, absorbing the friction between them, is precisely what is being removed.

This is not a new phenomenon arriving alongside the flattening story. It is what the flattening story was always going to produce, once followed far enough. This is the collision my earlier work named the Collapsing Equilibrium. 

Executives and experts have long depended on each other precisely because their territory stayed separate. Executives held commercial and organisational judgement. Experts held depth.

Neither needed to fully hold the other’s ground, because the boundary between them, and the people staffing that boundary, made the exchange work. Remove the boundary at speed, and both sides are pushed toward capability they were never required to build.

Some will close that gap quickly. They will learn to combine genuine command of their domain with the organisational judgement and political capability required to move that expertise through increasingly flattened systems, and they will end up more valuable, not less, once the old boundary is gone. 

Others will discover, at the exact moment the safety net disappears, that they were never holding what the boundary made it look like they were holding.

What this is not

This is not an argument that middle management was always waste, or that everyone occupying it has nothing to offer once coordination is automated. That claim is too broad to defend and too easy to dismiss. It is also not an argument that flattening is a mistake. Removing genuine overhead is not a mistake. It is correction.

What it is, precisely, is an exposure event. The organisations removing middle management are not simply reducing cost. They are accidentally revealing what they were really paying for all along. 

The question this leaves standing is no longer whether your role survives. It is whether the value you personally create survives, now that coordination is almost free.

Colin Gautrey, July 2026

¹ Gartner, “Gartner Unveils Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2025 and Beyond,” press release, 22 October 2024.

² Korn Ferry, Workforce 2025 survey; Live Data Technologies research reported by the Wall Street Journal; both cited in Forbes, 30 June 2026.