Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Managers and What It Means for Your Career

The middle manager is having a rough stretch, and the trend is reshaping careers across nearly every industry. According to Korn Ferry, 41% of employees globally and 44% in the U.S. say their organization has eliminated managerial levels, a corporate strategy known as "flattening." Companies argue that fewer layers mean faster decisions and lower costs, and some are betting that AI tools can absorb the coordination work managers once did. But the evidence on whether cutting managers actually works is mixed at best. At Metaintro, we track these shifts so job seekers can understand what a thinner management layer means for promotions, pay, and long-term career security.

What Does Flattening Actually Mean?

Flattening, sometimes called delayering, is the practice of removing rungs from a company's hierarchy so that fewer managers oversee more people. Instead of a director who manages managers who manage team leads who manage staff, a flatter company collapses those middle rungs and pushes more workers directly under fewer, broader leaders. The goal is to shorten the distance between the people doing the work and the people making the decisions.

The math behind this shift is striking. Gallup found that the average number of people reporting to a single manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, part of a nearly 50% increase in team size since Gallup began measuring in 2013. Today only 13% of managers oversee 25 or more people, but that group is growing as organizations consolidate roles. The "megamanager," responsible for a sprawling team, is becoming more common, and that changes the daily experience of everyone on the team.

It also changes who gets cut when budgets tighten. An analysis for Bloomberg by Live Data Technologies, reported by Entrepreneur, found that middle-management positions accounted for almost one-third of layoffs in 2023, up from 20% in 2018, and that manager-level or higher roles made up almost half of all layoffs that year. In other words, the layer in the middle is no longer the safest place to sit, and that reality is changing how careful workers think about their next move.

Is This Trend New?

It is not. Flattening feels like a 2026 story, but it is really the latest turn of a cycle that has repeated for decades. As research from the UK's Institute for Employment Studies documents, firms began aggressively shrinking management layers in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, a wave of delayering meant to cut cost and speed up decision-making. The most famous example was General Electric under Jack Welch, who compressed nearly a dozen layers between the CEO and the factory floor down to four or five and dramatically widened each remaining manager's span of control.

What is different this time is the technology driving it and the language around it. Where the 1990s wave was framed as restructuring, the current one is wrapped in terms like the "Great Flattening" and the "great unbossing," and it leans on software that did not exist a generation ago. The underlying pattern, though, is familiar. Companies expand and add layers in good times, then strip those layers out when they want to look leaner.

Knowing that history matters for your own planning. Past flattening waves did not erase management so much as redistribute it, leaving fewer managers with bigger jobs and pushing a lot of coordination work down onto the people who remained. The cycle also tends to reverse eventually, with companies quietly rebuilding layers once the costs of running too lean become obvious. Reading your employer's moves against that long rhythm helps you respond with strategy rather than panic.

Why Are Companies Doing This Now?

The first force is a stated push for speed and accountability. When Amazon announced roughly 14,000 corporate job cuts in October 2025, CEO Andy Jassy framed it around culture rather than finance. As reported by Technology Magazine, Jassy said rapid growth had added "a lot more layers" that slowed decision-making, and stressed the move "was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now at least." Other large employers have made similar moves to remove layers and widen spans of control.

The second force is artificial intelligence. Gartner predicted that through 2026, 20% of organizations would use AI to flatten their structure, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions. The logic is that AI can automate scheduling, reporting, and performance monitoring, the administrative core of many management jobs, so each remaining leader can supervise a far larger team. As Lacey Kaelani, CEO of Metaintro, told People Managing People, "AI is not completely eliminating roles, but instead restructuring roles and therefore slowing hiring for some jobs."

The third force is simple cost. Middle managers sit at an expensive pay level, and removing a layer can deliver immediate savings on a balance sheet. That is why flattening so often arrives bundled with broader cost-cutting, and why it tends to accelerate whenever the economy gets shaky and leadership wants to signal discipline to investors. A fourth, quieter force is cultural. Some leaders simply believe that too many managers breed bureaucracy and slow good ideas down, so they cut layers to push decisions closer to the customer.

Which Companies Are Leading the Charge?

The clearest case study is Bayer, the 160-year-old pharmaceutical and agriculture giant, which rolled out a model it calls Dynamic Shared Ownership worldwide in January 2024. Bayer cut its organizational layers from roughly twelve or thirteen down to six or seven, reduced management positions by about half, and reorganized much of its 100,000-person workforce into thousands of small, self-directed teams. It is one of the boldest bets on flattening any large employer has made, and the results are still being debated inside and outside the company.

Big technology firms moved earlier and set the tone. Meta's "year of efficiency" began in 2023, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a public filing and message to staff that the company would "flatten" its organization by removing layers of management and asking many managers to become individual contributors again. Amazon followed with its own multi-year push to raise the ratio of individual contributors to managers. Across these examples, the common thread is the same. Leaders want fewer people whose primary job is to manage other managers.

The pattern is no longer confined to tech and pharma. Banks, retailers, manufacturers, and media companies have all trimmed management layers over the past two years, often describing it as a move to push decisions closer to customers. For job seekers, the takeaway is that flattening is now a mainstream operating philosophy rather than a quirk of a few high-profile firms, so it is worth asking about a company's structure and span of control before you accept a role.

Will AI Really Replace Managers?

Many leaders clearly believe AI will let teams run with less hands-on supervision. A Gartner survey found that 80% of CEOs expect AI to force a high to medium degree of change to their operational capabilities as they shift toward more autonomous business models. The vision is teams that coordinate through software rather than through a human go-between.

That conviction is widespread among executives. A 2026 survey from WRITER found that 95% of executives say roles and team structures are already changing because of AI, and 75% expect AI agents to be part of their company's leadership within five years. Microsoft reported a 15x year-over-year jump in active AI agents inside its workplace tools, with leading "Frontier Firms" redesigning processes around AI rather than around layers of supervision. The bet is real, even if the payoff is still unproven.

The catch is that the parts of management AI handles well, scheduling, status tracking, and routine reporting, were never the hardest parts of the job. Coaching a struggling employee, defusing conflict, making a judgment call with incomplete information, and shielding a team from organizational noise all remain stubbornly human. So far, AI is shrinking the administrative shell of management, not the human core, and the companies that forget that distinction tend to learn it the hard way.

Does Flattening Actually Work?

Here is where the story gets complicated, and where the data urges caution. Flattening looks efficient on a spreadsheet, but the human costs show up fast. The same Korn Ferry research found that 40% of U.S. employees report a lack of direction after their company removed managers, and 72% of senior executives say they feel stressed and stretched beyond their abilities as they absorb the day-to-day work their managers used to handle.

As Korn Ferry Consulting CEO Lesley Uren put it, "When management disappears, so does direction," warning that "a leaner organization today can mean a leadership crisis tomorrow." Gallup adds an important nuance, finding that "manager talent trumps span of control," meaning a few highly skilled managers can lead big teams well, but stretching mediocre managers across huge teams erodes engagement and raises turnover. Cutting managers, in other words, is not a free win.

Not all flat companies are created equal. Some flatten thoughtfully, investing in their remaining managers and giving employees real autonomy. Others simply cut to save money and leave teams adrift, the pattern that produces the directionless feeling Korn Ferry documented. Reading which kind of flat company you work for is one of the most useful career skills you can develop right now, and the signals are usually visible in how much support and clarity people actually get day to day.

Is Management Still a Good Career Path?

The good news is that management as a field is not collapsing. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in management occupations will grow faster than the average for all occupations through 2034, with about 1.1 million openings each year and a median annual wage of $122,090 as of May 2024, well above the $49,500 median for all jobs. Leadership roles are being reshaped, not erased.

What is changing is the shape of the ladder. With fewer management slots, more workers are advancing along an individual contributor track instead, growing in scope, pay, and influence without ever taking on direct reports. In technology, guides like LeadDev describe a parallel path where senior staff and principal roles carry as much weight as management titles, and where top specialists can out-earn managers by mastering hard problems rather than people. The same logic is spreading to other fields, where deep expertise and the ability to lead without authority are becoming their own form of seniority.

What This Means for Your Career?

If you are early or mid-career, the biggest practical shift is that the old playbook of waiting your turn for a management title is less reliable than it used to be. With promotions scarcer and managers stretched thinner, the people who advance are the ones who grow their scope visibly rather than waiting to be tapped. Take on cross-team projects, volunteer to own an outcome, and document the results so your value is obvious even to a manager who oversees twelve other people.

It also pays to get deliberate about your track. The individual contributor path is now a real and well-compensated alternative to management at many companies, so you no longer have to manage people to keep climbing. Decide honestly whether you want to lead people or deepen a craft, then seek out an employer whose ladder actually supports that choice rather than one that quietly stalls senior specialists after a certain level.

Finally, build the human skills that flattening makes scarce. In a thinner organization, the people who can self-direct, communicate clearly across teams, mentor peers, and bring order to ambiguity become disproportionately valuable, precisely because there are fewer managers around to do it. Pair those skills with comfort using AI tools, and you position yourself as the kind of worker a flat company cannot run without, whichever direction the org chart swings next.

People Also Asked

Q: Why are companies cutting middle managers?

A: Companies flatten to cut costs and speed up decisions, since middle managers sit at an expensive pay level and add layers between the front line and senior leaders. According to Gartner, 20% of organizations are using AI to flatten structures, automating the reporting and monitoring work that filled many management jobs.

Q: Is it bad for my career if my company removes managers?

A: It can make promotions scarcer and leave you with less coaching, but it is not necessarily a dead end. Korn Ferry found 40% of U.S. employees feel directionless after cuts, so seek out mentors, take on visible projects, and grow your scope rather than waiting for a traditional title bump.

Q: Will management jobs disappear because of AI?

A: Not entirely. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects management employment will grow faster than average through 2034, even as AI absorbs routine administrative tasks. The roles are being restructured toward coaching, judgment, and coordination, the human work AI cannot replicate.

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