What is the key takeaway about Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Manager?

Middle managers are being systematically eliminated as CEOs embrace AI-driven, flatter organizational structures.

What is the key takeaway about Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Manager?

Surviving managers face record-low engagement and unsustainable workloads, with direct reports tripling in recent years.

What is the key takeaway about Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Manager?

Despite the purge, middle managers are critical for executing strategy, retaining talent, and driving AI adoption.

What is the key takeaway about Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Manager?

The role is evolving toward a 'player-coach' model that combines hands-on expertise with team leadership.

Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Managers in the AI Era

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⏎ Words Summary from News

**Middle managers face an existential threat as CEOs increasingly view them as redundant in the AI era.** Jack Dorsey, Brian Armstrong, and Brian Chesky have publicly argued for flatter organizations where AI coordinates work and individual experts make decisions without waiting for direction. Amazon's Andy Jassy is eliminating scores of managers to push decision-making closer to frontline workers, while Citigroup has slashed 13 management layers to eight. This isn't confined to tech—European pharma giants Bayer, Novartis, and Novo Nordisk have also argued that layers of bosses stifle performance.**Almost a quarter of job cuts in 2025 targeted midlevel workers, up from 11% in 2020, and those who remain are deeply miserable.** Gallup reports manager engagement at record lows, with workloads exploding as the number of direct reports per manager has more than tripled—from five to over 16—according to Gartner. Two-thirds of managers leading small teams feel pressured to work through mental-health challenges, and over 40% have been brought to tears by work stress in the past month. Half of Gen Z professionals now say they don't want to rise to middle management at all.**Yet middle managers remain vital for execution, employee retention, and AI adoption—roles that cannot be automated away.** McKinsey partners argue in *Power to the Middle* that this beaten-down layer is essential for carrying out C-suite strategy and preventing employee burnout. Managers are now tasked with ensuring teams actually adopt AI tools, but this often devolves into blunt enforcement, with one former Amazon manager describing it as "management by spreadsheet." The human side of management—coaching, clearing roadblocks, building trust—is becoming more critical, not less, as administrative tasks get automated.**The future of middle management lies in the "player-coach" model, where leaders remain hands-on experts while guiding teams.** Kimberly Hartstein, a sales and marketing director, exemplifies this shift: she still does her old job while clearing roadblocks for her staff. HubSpot's chief people officer warns that "the caliber of people manager needs to be higher than ever before" because the human element is now paramount. As workplace consultant Melissa Swift notes, these roles are the training ground for senior leadership—making it essential to identify who can truly lead.**What to watch next:** Whether companies that aggressively cut middle managers see a rise in employee burnout, AI adoption failures, or a talent drain as the human cost of flattened hierarchies becomes clear.

Key Takeaways

Middle managers are being systematically eliminated as CEOs embrace AI-driven, flatter organizational structures.
Surviving managers face record-low engagement and unsustainable workloads, with direct reports tripling in recent years.
Despite the purge, middle managers are critical for executing strategy, retaining talent, and driving AI adoption.
The role is evolving toward a 'player-coach' model that combines hands-on expertise with team leadership.

Insights & Analysis

The real risk isn't that middle managers disappear, but that companies strip out the human infrastructure needed to make AI work—creating a productivity paradox where efficiency tools fail without human guidance.
This trend may accelerate a generational divide: as Gen Z rejects management roles, companies could face a leadership vacuum just when the human element of management becomes most valuable.

Original source

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/why-companies-are-cutting-middle-managers-in-the-ai-era?srnd=phx-management-work

Sentiment

Summary

**Almost a quarter of job cuts in 2025 targeted midlevel workers, up from 11% in 2020, and those who remain are deeply miserable.** Gallup reports manager engagement at record lows, with workloads exploding as the number of direct reports per manager has more than tripled—from five to over 16—according to Gartner. Two-thirds of managers leading small teams feel pressured to work through mental-health challenges, and over 40% have been brought to tears by work stress in the past month. Half of Gen Z professionals now say they don't want to rise to middle management at all.

**Yet middle managers remain vital for execution, employee retention, and AI adoption—roles that cannot be automated away.** McKinsey partners argue in *Power to the Middle* that this beaten-down layer is essential for carrying out C-suite strategy and preventing employee burnout. Managers are now tasked with ensuring teams actually adopt AI tools, but this often devolves into blunt enforcement, with one former Amazon manager describing it as "management by spreadsheet." The human side of management—coaching, clearing roadblocks, building trust—is becoming more critical, not less, as administrative tasks get automated.

**The future of middle management lies in the "player-coach" model, where leaders remain hands-on experts while guiding teams.** Kimberly Hartstein, a sales and marketing director, exemplifies this shift: she still does her old job while clearing roadblocks for her staff. HubSpot's chief people officer warns that "the caliber of people manager needs to be higher than ever before" because the human element is now paramount. As workplace consultant Melissa Swift notes, these roles are the training ground for senior leadership—making it essential to identify who can truly lead.

**What to watch next:** Whether companies that aggressively cut middle managers see a rise in employee burnout, AI adoption failures, or a talent drain as the human cost of flattened hierarchies becomes clear.

Key Takeaways

Insights

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Middle managers shouldn’t exist anymore.

That’s what Jack Dorsey thinks, anyway. The co-founder of Twitter and fintech company Block Inc. recently penned a management manifesto calling for “a different kind of company,” one where an AI-powered “intelligence layer” coordinates work in place of middle managers, while individual experts make decisions and solve problems “without waiting to be told what to do.”

A big company without middle management might sound far-fetched, but it’s the sort of enterprise a growing number of chief executive officers seem to favor, in tech, finance and beyond. Coinbase Global Inc. chief Brian Armstrong said in a layoff memo that there will be no more “pure managers” at the cryptocurrency exchange, while Airbnb Inc.’s Brian Chesky said he doubted that “people managers will have any value in the future.” Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy has said he wants to eliminate scores of managers to “drive decision-making closer to the front lines.”

Bank of America Corp. chief Brian Moynihan seeks to “strike the right balance of managers and teammates.” At Citigroup Inc., 13 management layers were reduced to eight. This isn’t just an American trend — the CEOs of European pharmaceutical giants Bayer, Novartis and Novo Nordisk have all argued that strata of bosses limit people’s ability to do their job well.

Cutting middle managers is nothing new, but the team leaders standing between individual contributors and company executives have never had such a big target on their back. Almost a quarter of job cuts in 2025 took aim at midlevel workers, up from 11% in 2020, according to Live Data Technologies. Those who remain tend to be miserable, with manager engagement levels tracked by researcher Gallup at record lows. The heavier workloads left behind by the job cuts are part of the reason: Consulting firm Gartner Inc. found the number of direct reports per manager at large organizations has more than tripled in recent years, from five to more than 16.

Most middle managers get their jobs by excelling in some entry-level role only to be thrust overnight into running teams composed of former peers, and often without much training or guidance. No wonder they’re depicted as clueless traffic cops.

According to a survey by workplace mental-health provider Modern Health, two-thirds of managers leading teams of fewer than 10 felt pressured to work through their own mental-health challenges; work stress had brought more than 40% of those surveyed to tears over the past month.

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It’s so bad that about half of Generation Z professionals don’t ever want to rise to middle management, a 2026 UK survey of white-collar workers found, while a trio of partners at management consultant McKinsey & Co. felt compelled to write an entire book reminding CEOs that middle managers matter. “The very management layer that has been so severely beaten down is now absolutely vital to achieving organizational success,” they argue in Power to the Middle, “and most senior leaders still don’t realize that.” They’re the ones who carry out the C-suite’s strategy, they know how to get stuff done, and research shows they’re the primary reason employees either thrive or burn out.

Many employees “are craving some sense of stability and guidance, a person they can lean on,” says Melanie Naranjo, chief people officer at workplace compliance training platform Ethena. “When you have one manager who’s managing 17 people, there’s no way you can convince me that they have a good relationship with every single person.”

Lately middle managers are also tasked with making sure employees adopt artificial intelligence, by encouraging experimentation, rejiggering workflows and fixing errors generated by “AI slop.” Without such support, Gallup found, AI will remain a tool people play with rather than become the efficiency-booster CEOs demand. But this directive can get reduced to blunt enforcement. “Managers are struggling more today than in the past,” says Jim Harter, chief scientist for workplace management at Gallup. “They already had a lot on their plate, and now this.” Some former managers recently dismissed at Amazon chafed at the company’s demands to track how often employees were using AI tools. “It was management by spreadsheet,” says a senior manager with more than a decade’s tenure, who was laid off in January and asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing his severance agreement.

Middle managers need not go extinct, but they’ll likely have to evolve. To that end, AI may actually help. Middle managers historically have cascaded orders down to the rank and file, while filtering crucial information up the chain of command. Increasingly that flow can be automated, with AI tools easily analyzing corporate data. “That component of their work is going away — I’m sold on that,” says Erica Seldin, an organizational consultant who’s worked with Bayer, Autodesk and PepsiCo.

What’s left is the “human side of what managers do,” which is “where people get stuck” not knowing what’s expected of them, Seldin says. McKinsey found that middle managers spend almost three-quarters of their time on administrative tasks or other work not directly related to talent management.

Kimberly Hartstein, 36, a sales and marketing director at a biotech company, views the role she was recently promoted to “mostly as clearing roadblocks” so her staff can focus on their work. (She’s also still doing her old nonmanagerial job, which hasn’t been backfilled yet.) Rather than perpetuate bureaucracy, she’s trying to shield her team from it. Hartstein is an example of the “player-coach” model of manager, which Dorsey believes will come to replace the old-school boss. Ideally player-coaches are freed from shuttling information up and down the chain and can focus on coding, building models or whatever specialized tasks they were hired to do, while providing direct instruction so others can develop. Chris Layden, CEO of staffing firm Kelly Services Inc., describes this model as “an investment in people.”

As the role of middle manager changes, it’s more important to figure out who is truly capable of leading others. “The caliber of people manager needs to be higher than ever before,” says Helen Russell, chief people officer at software maker HubSpot Inc., “because the human element of what you’re doing is more important than it ever has been.” These are also the people who in turn become executives, workplace consultant Melissa Swift says: “It’s the training ground for the challenges of senior leadership.”