Is Middle Management Disappearing? What the Flattening Data Shows

Which companies have cut middle management?

Meta removed multiple layers of management in its 2023 Year of Efficiency. Amazon mandated a 15 percent increase in its ratio of individual contributors to managers, then cut about 14,000 corporate roles in October 2025. Google cut 10 percent of its management positions over two years. UPS cut 12,000 jobs, primarily management, in January 2024.

Meta went first and wrote the template. In March 2023, Mark Zuckerberg announced the Year of Efficiency: “we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors.” The plan reduced Meta's team by around 10,000 people and closed around 5,000 open roles. Amazon followed in September 2024 with a ratio rather than a headcount: at least 15 percent more individual contributors per manager by the end of Q1 2025. Then in October 2025 Amazon cut about 14,000 corporate roles, and GeekWire relayed Reuters reporting that the total could ultimately reach 30,000.

The evidence grades differ, and the differences matter. The Meta and Amazon statements are primary sources, published on the companies' own newsrooms. The Google figure is secondary reporting of remarks Sundar Pichai made at a December 2024 town hall, with some roles eliminated and others converted to individual contributor positions; no primary Google statement exists in public. FreightWaves reported the UPS cuts at 12,000 full- and part-time management and contract jobs, expected to save about $1 billion in 2024, with unionized drivers untouched.

Why are companies removing management layers?

Speed, on the companies' own accounts. Mark Zuckerberg wrote that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion, and compressed the argument to three words: flatter is faster. Andy Jassy pointed at pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings. By late 2025, Amazon framed layer removal as an AI-era requirement.

Zuckerberg's memo is the plainest statement of the logic: “It's well-understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making.” Jassy's September 2024 message named the symptom instead, citing “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings” and promising: “Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.” Both are CEOs describing their own companies, so read them as intent on the record, not as neutral measurement.

What changed between 2023 and 2025 is the stated reason. Meta sold its flattening as efficiency; AI barely figures in the memo. Amazon's October 2025 message announcing the 14,000-role reduction, written by Beth Galetti, SVP of People Experience and Technology, opens with AI: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet.” Amazon, Galetti wrote, needs “to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible.” The structural move stayed the same. The justification migrated from cost to AI, and whether AI is actually replacing jobs is a question the measured record answers far more narrowly than the memos imply.

How many direct reports does a manager have now?

Gallup puts the average at 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9 in 2024, as relayed by Ramp's research on manager layoffs. The managers who remain absorb the teams of those who left. Middle managers made up one-third of all layoffs in 2023, per a Bloomberg and Live Data Technologies analysis.

The span-of-control number is where the removed layer goes. When a company deletes a management level, the people underneath it report to somebody, and that somebody now runs a wider team. Ramp's May 2026 research piece carries Gallup's measurement: “the average number of people reporting to managers climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 last year.” The same piece relays the Bloomberg and Live Data Technologies finding that middle managers made up one-third of all layoffs in 2023.

Survey data describes how the flattening feels from underneath. In a 2025 Korn Ferry survey, also relayed by Ramp, 41 percent of professionals said their company had cut roles at the manager level, and the lack of managers left 37 percent of respondents feeling directionless. Every figure in this section is industry research reported secondhand, none of it official statistics, and the survey shares are self-reported. The direction is consistent all the same: fewer managers, each carrying more.

Are mid-size companies disappearing too?

No, not in official data through 2023. Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics show firms with 100 to 4,999 employees holding between 29 and 32 percent of US private employment every year since 1978, and the count of those firms grew from about 99,000 in 2000 to about 115,000 in 2023.

This is the distinction the flattening story usually skips. Management layers are thinning inside companies; mid-size companies as a class are not thinning at all. Computed from the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics firm-size series, the employment share of firms with 100 to 4,999 employees was 29.1 percent in 1978 and 31.5 percent in 2023. The share that fell belongs to small firms. The share that grew belongs to giants.

Mid-market survey data points the same way. The National Center for the Middle Market's year-end 2025 report, a recurring survey of 1,000 C-suite executives, put year-over-year revenue growth at 11.7 percent, just below the post-pandemic average of 12 percent, with nearly two-thirds of businesses saying they will grow employment at an increasing rate in 2026. Self-reported, but not a death notice. What is disappearing is a layer inside the org chart, not the mid-size company.

Will AI eliminate middle management?

Unknown. Gartner forecast in October 2024 that 20 percent of organizations will use AI to flatten their structure through 2026, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions. That is a forecast, not a measurement. What sits on the record is Amazon tying its 14,000-role cut to the AI era.

The Gartner figure deserves its label. The prediction, from a Gartner press release of October 2024: “20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their organizational structure through 2026, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions.” A vendor forecast about what organizations will do is a different kind of claim from a count of what organizations have done, and nothing in the measured record yet matches its size.

Operators are starting to argue the structural version out loud. Roman Pedan, founder and CEO of hotel operator Kasa, in an August 2026 Fortune commentary: “AI will strengthen the biggest platforms and make the smallest specialists more formidable.” Firms in the middle, Pedan argues, carry enough overhead to need scale but lack enough scale to fund a differentiated platform. That is a thesis, and I share it: I expect the flattening to continue as agent capability improves, which is the position the agentic organization series argues with the counter-evidence included. The Census firm-size data that could confirm a structural break ends at 2023. The releases covering 2024 through 2026 will settle whether the forecast survived contact with the data.

What replaces middle management?

Coordination has to come from somewhere. Middle management existed to keep plans, priorities, and progress consistent across teams. Where companies remove the layer, that load moves onto wider-span managers and onto the plan itself. Gallup's span numbers show the first half happening. The tooling for the second half is newer.

The flattening produces the same shape at both ends of the size distribution. Inside a giant, a post-flattening pod runs with wider spans and fewer approvals between it and shipped work. At the small end, the teams that never hired the layer look identical: teams of 45 to 60 people were holding $100 million in ARR in 2025 without a management tier. Either way, a lean team ends up supervising more parallel streams of human and agent work than a weekly status meeting can absorb, and the shared plan goes stale first.

That constraint is what Nazr is built for, whether the lean team is a seed-stage company or a pod inside a 200,000-person incumbent. Nazr is a system of record for teams shipping with agents: one canonical plan, with calls, commits, and agent reports arriving as signals from the tools a team already runs, changes landing as accept-or-dismiss proposals with provenance, and approved work routed to agents with commits linked back as proof. The Linear and Jira comparisons set out where that sits relative to an issue tracker: one layer up, where the plan lives.

The record as of August 2026: Meta, Amazon, Google, and UPS have all removed management layers on the record since March 2023, the average manager's span widened from 10.9 to 12.1 direct reports in a year, and firms with 100 to 4,999 employees still hold 31.5 percent of US private employment, inside the same three-point band they have occupied since 1978.