Most coverage of the vanishing middle manager reads as a story about executives with a spreadsheet. It is also a story about the managers themselves, and that half gets missed. The layer is not only being cut from above. It is quietly opting out.
Gallup's 2025 survey, drawing on more than 263,000 respondents, found that manager engagement dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025, the largest single-year fall of any group it tracks (Gallup, 2025). Over the same window global employee engagement slid to 20 percent, its lowest since 2020, a decline Gallup ties to roughly 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, or about 9 percent of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). Managers, the people supposedly responsible for reversing that trend, are disengaging faster than the teams they lead.
Why the middle burns first
The reason is visible in how managers spend their days. Deloitte's 2025 survey of nearly 10,000 leaders in 93 countries found managers giving close to 40 percent of their time to firefighting and administration and only 13 percent to developing their people, while 36 percent said they felt unprepared for the people-management part of the job in the first place (Deloitte, 2025). That is a role defined by interruption and thin on the work that gives it meaning. Ask someone to spend two-fifths of the week absorbing shocks, less than a seventh of it on the part that motivated them to take the job, and then wonder why engagement is falling.
The layoffs make it worse, not better. Deloitte also recorded a 42 percent drop in advertised middle-management roles in the United States between spring 2022 and the end of 2024 (Deloitte, 2025). A manager watching that contraction is being asked to carry more span with fewer peers, less certainty about the role's future, and the same firefighting load. Disengagement in that position is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a job that has been widened, hollowed, and put on notice at once.
There is a compounding effect that boards tend to miss. A disengaged manager is not a private problem; the role sits between the strategy above and the delivery below, and its mood travels in both directions. When the person responsible for a team's daily experience is running on fumes, the team feels it before any survey captures it. Gallup's estimate that disengagement costs the world economy near 10 trillion dollars, roughly 9 percent of global GDP, is not a number generated by individual apathy (Gallup, 2025). It is generated at scale, and the manager is the multiplier. Let the multiplier disengage and the loss does not stay contained to one salary.
Engagement is a design decision
The temptation is to read all this as a downturn to wait out. Gallup's own data argues against that. In organizations following best practice, 79 percent of managers are engaged, nearly four times the global average of 22 percent (Gallup, 2025). The gap between common practice and best practice is far too large to be explained by economic weather. It is explained by design: how the role is scoped, what it is measured on, and whether managing people is treated as the job or as the thing you do after the real job.
This is where the flattening debate takes a useful turn. If the manager's role is mostly administrative firefighting, cutting it looks sensible, and the disengagement numbers seem to confirm the diagnosis. But the Buurtzorg case shows a different move. The Dutch home-care company runs more than 900 self-managing teams and roughly 14,700 staff with no middle managers, supporting them instead with a small group of coaches who hold no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025). It did not fix manager disengagement by improving the manager role. It redesigned the work so the demoralizing parts of that role never had to be held by a single squeezed person.
That is the real lesson inside the engagement collapse. A role that consistently produces disengagement is telling you something structural. You can respond by cutting it, which leaves the coordination homeless, or by rebuilding it, which is what the best-practice organizations in Gallup's data have done. Both paths end the middle manager as we knew the role. Only one of them keeps the management.
The signal to watch
For leaders deciding what to do with their own middle layer, manager engagement is the more honest metric than headcount. A falling number does not prove the layer is unnecessary. It proves the role is badly built. Before treating disengaged managers as evidence that the layer should go, it is worth asking whether any human could stay engaged in a job that is 40 percent firefighting and 13 percent the actual point. The companies pulling four times the average engagement out of the same labor market answered that question by changing the job, not the person. The great flattening will be remembered less for the managers it removed than for how few organizations bothered to ask why the role stopped working in the first place.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% in a year, global engagement hit 20%, and best-practice firms reach 79% manager engagement, showing disengagement is a design gap. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Managers spend ~40% firefighting and 13% developing people, 36% feel unprepared to manage people, and US middle-management postings fell 42%, explaining why the role burns out. 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. Buurtzorg supports 900+ teams with coaches who hold no formal authority, showing the demoralizing parts of the manager role can be redesigned out. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y