RTO fights, AI rollouts, and cost cuts have converged on the same layer: the middle. Employers in the United States advertised 42 percent fewer middle-management roles at the end of 2024 than in spring 2022 (Deloitte, 2025). Manager morale is sliding too. Global manager engagement fell from 27 percent to 22 percent in a single year, part of a broader drop that has pushed overall employee engagement down to 20 percent in 2025, with Gallup estimating about 9 percent of global GDP in lost productivity, roughly 10 trillion dollars (Gallup, 2025). Meanwhile two-thirds of leaders describe their organizations as overly complex and inefficient, and only half say they are prepared for shocks (McKinsey, 2023). The middle is getting squeezed from above and below.
The market is already flattening
If the job is disappearing, it is because much of it has become administrivia. Managers report spending nearly 40 percent of their time firefighting and on administration, and only 13 percent developing people. Over a third feel unprepared for the people part of the job (Deloitte, 2025). That is a poor match for a world that rewards clarity of outcomes over orchestration of meetings.
Automation is not neutral here. Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2026, 20 percent of surveyed organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of the middle-management positions in those firms. This is a prediction, not a present fact, but it sets the direction of travel (Fortune, 2025). The engagement gap shows what is at stake. In best-practice organizations, 79 percent of managers are engaged compared with a global average of 22 percent, evidence that design choices, not fate, drive managerial energy and value (Gallup, 2025).
Leaders also concede that complexity has run ahead of their capacity to manage it. McKinsey’s survey of more than 2,500 business leaders found only half believe their organizations are ready to anticipate and react to shocks, and two-thirds call their systems overly complex and inefficient (McKinsey, 2023). Hybrid work has become the default for most white-collar firms since the pandemic, which raises the coordination burden while making presence a weak proxy for contribution (McKinsey, 2023). In that context, flattening is not an ideology. It is a response to bloat and the limits of manager-as-traffic-cop.
What replaces the middle when it works
The Netherlands’ Buurtzorg shows how a large enterprise can run with almost no middle managers at all. As of January 2021 the company operated more than 900 self-managing nursing teams of up to 12 people and employed around 14,700 staff. It had two directors, roughly 50 people in the back office, and no middle managers or supervisors. About 21 internal coaches supported roughly 950 teams, with no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Past audits reported an overhead ratio near 8 percent versus a sector average of 25 percent around 2015, an early signal that the model could strip layers of cost, though the authors note the figure’s vintage and that Buurtzorg’s hourly rate has been higher than peers (€54.47 versus €48.74) (Martela and Nandram, 2025). This is a case study, not an experiment, and the authors are explicit about boundaries. The approach performs best when interdependence between teams is low, frontline professionals are both skilled and motivated, and the service can be decomposed into local, end-to-end work (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
That contingency thinking is essential. A decade ago the debate over self-management was cast as liberation versus naivety. Harvard Business Review’s review of holacracy and related models argued for a balance: avoid both celebration of leaderless utopias and blanket dismissal, and learn where the tools fit (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). In 2016 Zappos was the largest firm to implement holacracy, a fact that energized the conversation. It later moved away from the model around 2020, a useful reminder that governance is a living design, not a doctrine locked in amber (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016).
The pattern is clear enough to guide choices. Push decisions closer to the work where interdependence is low and measurement is clear, then give managers leverage through systems rather than headcount. In Buurtzorg, the coaches act as mentors and connectors, not overseers, while technology and simple rules handle the routine. The result is fewer layers without managerial vacuum. It is a different job, not an absence of management (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
Design rules for a thinner middle
Three implications follow from the evidence.
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Strip the role back to its highest-value tasks. The current split is upside down: too much firefighting and paperwork, too little development and stewardship. Redesign workflows so status collection, compliance checks, and routine approvals live in systems, not in calendar time. Treat the 13 percent managers spend on developing people as the floor, not the ceiling (Deloitte, 2025).
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Flatten where the work allows it, not because a memo says so. Buurtzorg’s boundary conditions matter: low inter-team interdependence, skilled frontline professionals, and services that can be owned locally (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Where interdependence is high or measures are fuzzy, the answer is to clarify interfaces and outcomes before cutting layers. McKinsey’s finding that many leaders see their organizations as overly complex is a cue to simplify the system first (McKinsey, 2023).
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Redefine the manager as designer and coach. The engagement gap, with 79 percent in best-practice environments versus 22 percent globally, shows that architecture lifts energy. Give managers responsibility for shaping the conditions of good work, then assess them on team health and outcomes, not on the volume of escalations they process (Gallup, 2025). McKinsey highlights firms such as Haier as beacons of self-evolving design, reinforcing that distributed leadership can be a repeatable system, not a personality cult (McKinsey, 2023).
The temptation will be to swing to extremes. Some will declare the end of management and celebrate flatness as a virtue in itself. Others will cling to spans and layers as if hierarchy were a safety blanket. The wiser course is to test where a thinner middle creates flow and ownership, then reassign the remaining managerial effort to coaching, architecture, and escalations that genuinely require judgment. The forecasts about AI-driven flattening may or may not fully materialize on Gartner’s timetable, but the drift is unmistakable and the engagement math is already here (Fortune, 2025; Gallup, 2025).
The practical read for leaders is blunt. Do not wait for a pink-slip wave or a platform update to define your structure. Map the work, name the interdependencies, and move routine coordination into tools and standards. Where the work fits, let teams own outcomes end to end. Where it does not, redesign the interfaces until it does. The middle manager is not a species to save or cull. It is a bundle of tasks to reassemble with intent.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Shows managers spend nearly 40% on firefighting/admin and only 13% on developing people, reports 42% fewer US middle-management postings since 2022, and frames the great-flattening context. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Documents global engagement at 20% with an estimated $10 trillion productivity cost and a sharp fall in manager engagement, plus a 79% vs 22% best-practice gap that underscores design effects. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- McKinsey (2023). The State of Organizations 2023. Finds only half of leaders think their firms are prepared for shocks and two-thirds see excessive complexity, and notes widespread hybrid adoption since COVID. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Describes large-scale operation without middle managers, the coach model, boundary conditions, a dated low-overhead signal, and a higher hourly rate, offering a nuanced case. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Argues for a balanced view of self-management and notes Zappos as the largest holacracy adopter in 2016, a reminder to match governance to context. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Fortune (2025). Surviving the great flattening: the coming extinction of the middle manager. Reports Gartner’s forecast that by end-2026, 20% of surveyed organizations will use AI to flatten structure, eliminating more than half of middle-management roles in those firms. https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/surviving-great-flattening-coming-extinction-of-middle-manager-layoffs/