Middle‑manager cuts warned

Companies are cutting middle managers to save money, but the same cuts are stripping out the people who turn executive plans into daily work. (aol.com) Fortune reported on April 12 that the risk is not only fewer supervisors today, but a weaker bench of future leaders by 2028 as firms keep “flattening” org charts. Gartner said in October 2024 that 20% of organizations would use artificial intelligence through 2026 to flatten structures and eliminate more than half of current middle-management positions. (fortune.com) (gartner.com) The cuts are already visible in hiring and layoffs. Korn Ferry, citing Live Data Technologies, said middle managers accounted for 29% of layoffs in 2024, up from an average 22% between 2018 and 2022, while Korn Ferry also said Revelio Labs found middle-management openings down more than 40% since 2022. (kornferry.com) Middle managers do work that rarely shows up on an org chart: they assign priorities, coach staff, resolve conflicts, and make sure a strategy survives contact with day-to-day operations. Gallup said manager support is also a strong predictor of whether employees actually use new artificial-intelligence tools at work. (aol.com) (hrdive.com) That layer is under strain even before more cuts. Gallup said global manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025, and global employee engagement fell to 20%, the lowest level since 2020. (prnewswire.com) Korn Ferry found 72% of senior executives at United States companies said they felt stressed and stretched beyond their abilities as firms removed management layers. The same survey said 44% of United States workers felt their company had cut middle managers, and 40% said they now have less support from leadership. (kornferry.com) (cfodive.com) Companies have defended the cuts as a way to speed decisions and reduce bureaucracy. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described “managers managing managers” as an inefficiency in 2023, and other large employers have made similar arguments while trimming layers. (forbes.com) The counterargument is that a flatter chart can leave senior leaders overloaded and frontline workers with fewer coaches, fewer translators, and fewer people to escalate problems to. Fortune’s reporting says the savings can look clean in a quarterly budget even as execution gets weaker over several years. (fortune.com) (cfodive.com) That makes the middle-manager debate less about one job title than about whether companies can still build leaders and run routines after they cut the people in between. (fortune.com)