Budgets are tight, AI is hot, and attrition risk has not gone away. Many boards are trimming the organizational middle while asking the same people to return to the office and do more with less. The question is not whether the middle manager label will shrink. It is whether the work managers do will be redistributed with intent or abandoned to luck.
What the numbers actually say
Two large surveys sketch the pressure and the opportunity. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends, based on nearly 10,000 business and HR leaders in 93 countries, reports that managers spend almost 40 percent of their time on firefighting and administration, only 13 percent on developing people, and more than a third feel unprepared for the people side of the job (Deloitte, 2025). The same report notes that U.S. employers were advertising 42 percent fewer middle-management roles at the end of 2024 than in the spring of 2022, a visible sign that the layer is thinning (Deloitte, 2025).
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 puts a price on drift. Global engagement fell to 20 percent, the lowest since 2020, with Gallup estimating about 10 trillion dollars of lost productivity, roughly 9 percent of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). Managers themselves are struggling. Their engagement dropped nine points since 2022, with the steepest single-year fall from 27 to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025 (Gallup, 2025). The counterpoint matters. In best-practice organizations Gallup finds 79 percent of managers engaged, nearly four times the global average, which suggests the gap is about organizational design, not fate (Gallup, 2025). None of this is causal proof, but it is a strong signal that the manager job, as commonly configured, is misaligned with what creates value.
The flattening wave, with a forecast attached
Automation adds velocity. Both Deloitte and Fortune cite a Gartner forecast that by the end of 2026, 20 percent of organizations surveyed will use AI to flatten their structures (Deloitte, 2025; Fortune, 2025). Fortune reports the same Gartner prediction goes further for those adopters: more than half of current middle-management roles in those firms would be eliminated, a forecast not an outcome (Fortune, 2025). The motivation is easy to see. If status reports, capacity planning, and routine approvals are increasingly automated, then a large share of the manager’s visible work looks duplicative.
Predictions are not destiny, and surveys are not experiments. Still, if the middle is thinner, the coordination, coaching, and context-setting that kept teams moving must live somewhere. Either frontline teams shoulder more autonomy with explicit support, or senior leaders absorb risk and decision flow. The latter rarely scales.
A case of scale without the middle
One contemporary system shows that an organization can operate at scale without conventional middle managers, under specific conditions. Buurtzorg, a Dutch home-care provider, ran more than 900 self-managing teams with about 14,700 employees as of January 2021, with only two directors and roughly 50 people in the back office. It relied on 21 internal coaches to support around 950 teams, a ratio of more than 45 teams per coach, and those coaches had no formal authority or productivity accountability for the teams (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The organization’s overhead was reported as 8 percent versus a sector average of 25 percent in analyses around 2015, although Buurtzorg’s hourly costs were higher than peers at €54.47 versus €48.74 (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
This is a peer-reviewed case, not an experiment, and one of the authors has research ties to Buurtzorg, so caution is warranted on generalizing (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The authors also flag boundaries. The model works best when interdependence between teams is low, frontline professionals are skilled and motivated, and the service allows discretion at the edge (Martela and Nandram, 2025). In other words, the work of the middle did not disappear. It migrated into team routines, lightweight coaching, and simple rules.
How to redesign the work, not just the org chart
Self-management has been romanticized and dismissed in equal measure. A balanced reading is overdue. Harvard Business Review’s analysis of holacracy-era experiments argued in 2016 for a clear-eyed view of what self-management can deliver and what it cannot. It noted that Zappos was then the largest company to implement holacracy and examined Morning Star, Valve, and Buurtzorg as variations on the theme, urging leaders to look past hype and backlash and toward the mechanics of role clarity and governance (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). The lesson for 2020s leaders is not to import a brand name, but to refactor the managerial job.
Four design moves follow from the evidence.
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Strip out administrative churn. If nearly 40 percent of a manager’s week is swallowed by firefighting and admin, use AI and process redesign to remove the busywork and measure the change. The target is not novel tools. It is time released for coaching and context, the 13 percent slice that Deloitte identifies as perilously thin today (Deloitte, 2025).
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Make manager engagement a leading metric. Manager disengagement correlates with organizational drag. Gallup’s best-practice benchmark of 79 percent engaged managers shows what is feasible when the role is well designed and supported (Gallup, 2025). Treat that spread as an audit of your design, then test and iterate.
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If you remove layers, add coaches on purpose. Buurtzorg’s coaches had no formal authority and supported dozens of teams, yet the system scaled. Do not copy the ratio. Use the principle. Separate performance accountability from developmental support so teams get help without recreating the old hierarchy (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
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Match structure to interdependence. Where work is modular and professionals can exercise judgment at the edge, more self-management is plausible. Where cross-team coupling is high, keep a layer whose explicit job is to set context and resolve trade-offs. This is managerial work by another name, and it must be resourced.
Flattening will likely continue. Gartner’s forecast, reported by Deloitte and Fortune, may prove conservative or ambitious depending on industry and task mix (Deloitte, 2025; Fortune, 2025). What should not continue is pretending that cutting titles automatically cuts work. Surveys show managers are underwater on administration and underinvested in people development. Cases show that, with the right conditions, teams can absorb more autonomy if given scaffolding and simple governance.
The practical implication is straightforward. Decide what must be managed and design for that. If you want fewer managers, build the coaching, information flow, and decision rules that make autonomy real. If you keep managers, rebuild the role so most of their week is about clarity, performance, and growth, not paperwork. The era of the traditional middle manager may be ending. The need for the work they did is not.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Finds managers spending ~40% on admin and only 13% on developing people, reports 42% fewer U.S. middle-management postings since 2022, and cites a Gartner forecast that 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten structures by 2026. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global engagement at 20% with an estimated $10T productivity cost, a 9-point drop in manager engagement since 2022 to 22%, and a 79% manager engagement benchmark in best-practice firms. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers, Journal of Organization Design. Case evidence of 900+ self-managing teams, 14,700 staff, 2 directors, 21 non-authority coaches, and historical overhead and cost-per-hour figures, with stated boundary conditions. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype, Harvard Business Review. Argues for a balanced view of self-management, noting Zappos as the largest holacracy adopter at the time and urging focus on mechanics over hype. 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 organizations will use AI to flatten structures, 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/