Return-to-office mandates flare, AI copilots arrive in every app, and finance keeps asking for fewer layers. The result lands squarely on the middle tier. Manager engagement has fallen sharply and postings for their jobs are down. Forecasts of mass elimination make headlines. The question leaders need to ask is not whether the middle manager is dying. It is which parts of the job survive, and where the work of management will live.
The squeeze is real, and it is measurable
Global employee engagement slid to 20 percent in 2025, with Gallup estimating about 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, roughly 9 percent of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). Managers are not immune. Their engagement dropped nine points since 2022, including the steepest annual fall from 27 to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025 (Gallup, 2025). This is survey evidence, not causal proof, but it captures strain at the very layer that is supposed to absorb change.
Organizations are responding by shrinking the middle. In the United States, employers advertised 42 percent fewer middle-management roles at the end of 2024 than in spring 2022, according to a global survey of nearly 10,000 business and HR leaders (Deloitte, 2025). The same report cites a Gartner forecast that by 2026, 20 percent of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures (Deloitte, 2025). A Fortune essay, attributing its numbers to Gartner, goes further, predicting that in those firms more than half of current middle-management positions will be eliminated, which is a forecast, not an outcome (Fortune, 2025).
If the middle is thinning, it is not because managers do not matter. It is because much of what they do is misaligned. Deloitte reports that managers spend almost 40 percent of their time on firefighting and administrative work, only 13 percent on developing people, and 36 percent feel unprepared for the people side of the role (Deloitte, 2025). In parallel, two-thirds of leaders say their organizations are overly complex and inefficient, and only half believe they are prepared to respond to external shocks, a context where more layers add friction rather than resilience (McKinsey, 2023). Since the pandemic, roughly 90 percent of firms adopted some form of hybrid work, which further strains coordination done by presence and ad hoc escalation (McKinsey, 2023).
Fewer layers does not mean less management
A decade ago, “bossless” experiments drew hype and backlash in equal measure. The most useful reading of that moment is still a call for balance. As of 2016 Zappos was the largest full adopter of Holacracy, and the broader debate about self-management had become polarized. The better question, the authors argued, was what promise self-managed teams can realistically deliver and under which conditions (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). That is the right lens now. The trend is not the extinction of management. It is the migration of managerial work into teams, platforms, and lightweight coaching.
Buurtzorg shows what this looks like at scale, in a highly regulated service. The Dutch home-care organization operated more than 900 self-managing teams of up to 12 nurses with about 14,700 employees as of January 2021, supported by only two directors and roughly 50 back-office staff. There are no middle managers or supervisors. Instead, 21 internal coaches support about 950 teams, more than 45 teams per coach, and the coaches have no formal authority or responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025). A historical comparison by KPMG around 2015 put Buurtzorg’s overhead at 8 percent against a sector average of 25 percent, an old figure worth labeling as such, and the authors note that Buurtzorg’s hourly rate is higher than peers, €54.47 versus €48.74 (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The case is not an argument that management costs vanish or that care is cheaper per hour. It is evidence that an organization can function without a supervisory middle if it designs for it, and that the work of integration can sit in teams and in coaching rather than in a chain of command.
Boundary conditions matter. The Buurtzorg model works best with relatively low interdependence across teams, highly motivated and competent frontline professionals, and services where local autonomy improves responsiveness, all drawn from a peer-reviewed case study rather than an experiment (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Leaders copying the aesthetic while ignoring the constraints will get the chaos the critics warn about.
What to keep, what to cut, and what to reassign
The data suggest three moves.
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Strip out the fake work of management. If managers spend almost 40 percent of their time in administrative loops, use AI, shared services, and standard processes to remove it. The Gartner forecast, cited by Deloitte, is directionally useful here. The aim is not to erase the role but to erase the tasks that do not require judgment or context (Deloitte, 2025).
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Put accountability in the team, not in a layer. Buurtzorg’s teams own scheduling, client relationships, and quality within clear constraints, which reduces the need for supervisors to coordinate handoffs that teams can handle themselves. Where interdependence is high, invest first in better interfaces and standards rather than in more managers. This is an interpretive step guided by the case evidence on team autonomy and coaching without authority (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
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Redefine the manager as a coach and system steward. The coaching ratio at Buurtzorg is extreme by corporate standards, yet coaches have no formal power. Their job is capability building and problem solving on demand. That recasts the “people part” of management that, by Deloitte’s numbers, gets just 13 percent of managerial time today (Deloitte, 2025). Teams then escalate to coaches for development and to platforms for information, not up a hierarchy for permission.
How to pilot without breaking the shop
Start where the conditions match the evidence. Choose units with skilled frontlines and bounded interdependence. Establish stable, self-contained teams. Shift routine approvals to rules in systems. Assign a small pool of respected coaches without line authority. Measure two things during the pilot: the share of managerial time reclaimed from administration, using Deloitte’s benchmarks as a before-and-after baseline, and team engagement relative to peers, using Gallup’s measures as a reference point rather than a scoreboard (Deloitte, 2025; Gallup, 2025).
Treat the social narrative with care. The 2016 HBR assessment argued that the self-management debate had become performative and that leaders needed to prize pragmatism over purity (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). That advice has aged well. Flattening for its own sake can produce brittle organizations when shocks hit, a risk McKinsey’s leaders already fear (McKinsey, 2023). Flattening with purpose, in contrast, means deciding explicitly where managerial judgment lives, which tasks belong in systems, and how teams get help without queuing for approval.
The practical implication is simple. The “end” of the middle manager is a misreading. The end of a particular bundle of tasks, incentives, and status is closer to the truth. Leaders who recast that bundle into team ownership, enabling platforms, and real coaching will shrink layers and raise engagement at the same time. Leaders who chase headcount without redesigning the work will get the worst of both worlds: fewer managers, and more management problems.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global engagement at 20 percent, a $10 trillion productivity cost, and a sharp drop in manager engagement, grounding the middle-manager squeeze. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Finds managers spend 40 percent on admin, only 13 percent on development, 36 percent feel unprepared; notes 42 percent fewer U.S. middle-management postings and cites a Gartner forecast of AI-driven flattening by 2026. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers, Journal of Organization Design. Documents 900+ self-managing teams, 14,700 staff (Jan 2021), no middle managers, 21 coaches without authority, historical overhead comparisons, and higher hourly rates, illustrating design trade-offs. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype, Harvard Business Review. Describes the polarized debate on self-management and notes Zappos as the largest adopter as of 2016, supporting a balanced, conditions-first lens. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- McKinsey (2023). The State of Organizations 2023. Reports two-thirds of leaders see excess complexity and only half feel prepared for shocks, and that roughly 90 percent adopted some hybrid model, framing why layers struggle to add value. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023
- Fortune (2025). Surviving the great flattening: the coming extinction of the middle manager. Cites a Gartner forecast that 20 percent of organizations will use AI to flatten by end-2026 and that in those firms more than half of middle-management roles could be eliminated, used here as a forecast to size the stakes. https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/surviving-great-flattening-coming-extinction-of-middle-manager-layoffs/