Companies are cutting management layers and widening spans of control across industries. The org chart gets leaner. The leadership work doesn’t go away. It lands on fewer people, most of whom were never set up to carry it.

Every HR leader has seen this slide in the last two years: a cleaner org chart, fewer boxes, a lower cost line, and a promise that the organization will move faster. Sometimes it does. But a flatter structure doesn’t reduce the need for leadership. It concentrates that need on fewer people. When a layer is removed, its work goes somewhere, usually to the managers who stay, and nobody tells them.

This is the “Great Flattening.” It has become one of the defining workforce stories of 2026, and the data explains why HR leaders should be paying attention.

The numbers behind the flattening

This isn’t a handful of headlines. Gartner predicted that through 2026, 20% of organizations would use AI to flatten their structures and eliminate more than half of their current middle-management positions.1 The labor-market data shows the shift underway. According to Revelio Labs and Live Data Technologies, hiring for middle managers has fallen 43% since 2022, compared with 14% for entry-level roles. Middle managers made up 32% of layoffs in 2023, 12 percentage points more than in 2019.2

Large employers have made it concrete. Citi cut its management layers from 13 to 8, UPS eliminated 12,000 of its 85,000 management roles, and Amazon set a goal of raising its ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%.2 Across public companies, manager roles fell 6.1% between May 2022 and May 2025.3

The managers who remain are carrying more people

When layers go, spans of control widen. Gallup’s 2026 research found the average manager’s span rose from 10.9 to 12.1 direct reports in a single year, nearly 50% higher than in 2013.4 Almost none of those managers get to focus on managing: 97% also carry individual-contributor work, and the typical manager spends about 40% of their time on non-managerial tasks.4

Compare that with what a development-focused leader can realistically handle. Organizational-design guidance cited in Forbes suggests that a manager who gives real feedback, judgment and mentoring tops out at around six or seven direct reports.3 Many organizations are now asking managers to coach nearly twice that number while still doing their own technical work.

What quietly disappears with each layer

Middle managers were never just coordinators. They turned strategy into weekly priorities, caught performance problems early, coached people through their first leadership roles, and served as the early-warning system for a disengaged team. None of that appears on the org chart, so none of it gets reassigned when the box is deleted.

Employees feel the gap. In Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce Survey, 41% of employees said their company had cut management layers, and 37% of those said the cuts left them feeling directionless.5 Readiness is an even bigger concern. HR Executive reports that only 6% of leaders believe their middle managers across the company are ready to lead change.6 In other words, organizations are putting more responsibility on the managers who remain and rarely preparing them for it.

Why this is an HR problem, not only a structure problem

Managers are the most powerful lever an organization has. Gallup has long found that managers account for about 70% of the variance in team engagement.7 That lever is already under strain. U.S. engagement has fallen to 30%, a decade low, and only 46% of employees say they clearly know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% in 2020.8 A manager with twelve or more direct reports and a full individual workload has little time to set clear expectations, and unclear expectations are exactly what the data shows declining.

Gallup also found that the time split matters more than the headcount. Talented managers who keep individual-contributor work at or below roughly 40% of their time have higher engagement than those who don’t, regardless of team size.4 So the wider span isn’t the core risk. The core risk is widening the span without removing anything else from the manager’s plate.

The view from the hangar floor

In aviation maintenance and defense, this goes beyond an engagement issue. A lead or supervisor in a repair station isn’t just a people manager. They are part of the quality and safety system. They sign off work, spot fatigue, and notice when a newer technician is uncomfortable raising a concern. If you double that supervisor’s span while their technical workload stays the same, the first thing to erode is the informal, one-on-one attention that catches problems before they become findings.

Five moves for HR leaders now

  • Design spans around coaching capacity, not cost targets. Before approving a restructure, ask how many people each remaining manager can realistically develop, and plan the structure around that answer.
  • Take work away before adding people. If a manager’s span grows, reduce their individual-contributor load to match. Gallup’s roughly 40% threshold is a useful guardrail.
  • Assign the development work that disappeared. Decide explicitly who now owns onboarding, performance conversations and first-time leader support. If no one is named, no one does it.
  • Invest in the managers who stayed. They were promoted to coordinate and are now expected to coach at scale. Targeted coaching for those leaders is one of the highest-return investments a flatter organization can make.
  • Rebuild the succession ladder. Removing middle rungs also removes the proving ground for future executives. Create deliberate stretch roles, rotations and development plans so the pipeline doesn’t disappear with the layer.

Leaner is not the same as stronger

The Great Flattening can make an organization faster, but only if leadership capacity is redesigned along with the org chart. Organizations that gain from flatter structures will treat their remaining managers as their most important asset: they will clear space for them to lead and invest in developing them. Organizations that don’t will find out, a year or two later, that removing a layer also removed much of their ability to develop people.

Apogee Executive Search & Advisory is an executive search and leadership-coaching firm focused on MRO and defense aviation. We help operators and MROs develop and retain the leaders who run them. To talk about supporting the managers in a flatter organization — inquiry@apogeesearch.net

References

  1. SHRM, “Transforming Work: Gartner’s AI Predictions Through 2029.” shrm.org
  2. ATD, TD Magazine, “Middling Returns” (March 2025), citing Revelio Labs and Live Data Technologies data. td.org
  3. Forbes Human Resources Council, “The Great Flattening Is Asking Managers To Coach Larger Teams” (July 30, 2026). forbes.com
  4. Gallup, “Span of Control: What’s the Optimal Team Size for Managers?” (January 2026). gallup.com
  5. Korn Ferry Workforce Survey 2025, as reported by Betterworks, “The Great Flattening.” betterworks.com
  6. J. Colletta, HR Executive, “’Great Flattening’ is shrinking management without preparing those who remain” (August 19, 2026). hrexecutive.com
  7. Gallup, “Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement” (State of the American Manager). news.gallup.com
  8. Fortune, “Worker engagement just hit a decade low” (June 23, 2026), reporting Gallup data. fortune.com