The Great Flattening: Leading Well When the Middle Gets Thin

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Dr. Jim Dittmar · 3Rivers Leadership Institute -- 4-5 minute read

The Manager with Twenty-Two Direct Reports

Picture a mid-level leader I’ll call Karen. Two years ago she led a team of seven. After two rounds of restructuring, she now has twenty-two direct reports spread across three time zones. “I used to know what each of my people was working toward,” she said. “Now I’m lucky if I know what they’re working on.”

Karen is a composite, but her story is not unusual. It is the human face of what many are calling the Great Flattening, and it may be one of the most consequential leadership shifts of this decade.

What the Great Flattening Is

Across industries, organizations are removing layers of middle management. Technology firms led the way, but healthcare systems, financial services, and manufacturers have followed. The rationale usually sounds reasonable: fewer layers mean faster decisions, lower costs, and less bureaucracy. AI tools promise to absorb some of the reporting, scheduling, and coordination work managers once did.

The numbers are striking:

In Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025 survey, 41% of employees said their organization had cut management layers (Korn Ferry, 2025).
Gartner predicted that through 2026, one in five organizations would use AI to flatten their structure, eliminating more than half of their middle management positions (Gartner, 2024).
Uber’s recent restructuring was aimed squarely at reducing layers, following Citi’s move from thirteen management layers to eight (Fast Company, 2026).

Some of this rationale holds up. Many organizations did accumulate layers that slowed things down. But flattening is rarely only a structural decision. When a layer disappears, the work it did does not vanish. It gets redistributed, often to the managers who remain, and often without anyone deciding who now owns the most human parts of leadership.

The Costs That Don’t Show Up on the Org Chart

The savings from flattening are easy to count. The costs are harder to see, and they tend to arrive later.

• A coaching vacuum. Gallup reports that the average U.S. manager’s span of control rose from 10.9 direct reports in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, and 13% of managers now oversee 25 or more (Gallup, 2026). A leader with twenty-two direct reports can manage tasks. It is nearly impossible to develop people at that span. One-on-ones shrink, then get canceled, then quietly stop.

• Manager overload. The remaining managers absorb the work of the departed layer on top of their own. This is fertile ground for the quiet cracking we explored in an earlier post: people who look fine from the outside while slowly coming apart.

• A broken leadership pipeline. Middle management has long been where future senior leaders learn to lead. Remove the rungs, and the ladder gets harder to climb.

• Lost translation. Middle managers interpret strategy for the front line and carry front- line reality back up. Without them, senior leaders can lose touch with what is actually happening. Korn Ferry found that 43% of employees say leadership isn’t aligned and 37% feel directionless (Fortune, 2025).

None of this means flattening is wrong. Gallup’s research suggests manager talent matters more than span of control itself: skilled managers can lead larger teams well, while stretched, under-supported managers struggle even with moderate teams (Gallup, 2026). It means flattening is a leadership decision, not just a structural one.

The Servant Leadership Application

All of these blogs reflect my personal commitment to Servant Leadership. Despite my shortcomings, I try my best to be that kind of leader whatever the context. My friends, Ken Blanchard and the late Frances Hesselbein have inspired me and millions of others to lead as a "servant first."

Ken Blanchard describes servant leadership as having two parts: a visionary role, where leaders set direction, and an implementation role, where leaders turn the pyramid upside down and serve the people doing the work. Flattening often protects the first and quietly starves the second. Here is how servant leaders can respond.

1. Redesign the role, not just the chart. If spans of control are widening, senior leaders owe their managers an honest conversation about what to stop doing. Serving managers means removing low-value work, not simply adding people to their roster.

2. Build development into the team, not just the manager. At wide spans, the manager cannot be the only coach. Peer mentoring, rotating team leads, and small learning cohorts spread the developmental load. The servant leader’s job becomes creating the conditions for people to grow one another.

3. Protect the conversations that matter most. When time is scarce, the first thing to go is the unhurried, listen-first conversation. Servant leaders guard it. Even a shorter, more focused one-on-one built around good questions (What’s getting in your way? What do you need from me?) keeps the relationship alive.

4. Listen up the line deliberately. With fewer layers to carry information upward, senior leaders must go looking for it. Skip-level listening sessions (where senior leaders meet directly with employees two or more levels below them), front-line visits, and simple “understanding the pulse of things” questions keep leaders connected to reality.

The character of the leader was a key to Frances Hesselbein's approach to servant leadership. In her famous quote that reminds us of this, she stated, "Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do" [emphasis mine]. Structures will keep changing. A leader’s commitment to the growth and well-being of their people should not.

A Closing Reflection

The Great Flattening asks every organization a revealing question: when we remove a layer of leaders, who takes responsibility for the people that layer used to serve? Organizations that answer it thoughtfully will be leaner and stronger. Those that ignore it may find they saved money on paper and lost something far more valuable in practice.

If you lead in a flattening organization, consider these questions:

• Who on my team has not had a meaningful developmental conversation with anyone in the last month?

• What work have I quietly handed my managers without taking anything off their plates?

• Where am I relying on information that used to come from a layer that no longer exists?

The org chart may be flatter. Our commitment to serving people does not have to be.