Gartner projects that one in five of companies will eliminate more than half their middle managers by the end of this year. The efficiency story sells itself. Flatten the structure, speed up decisions, improve margins. The savings are real. What won’t show up until 2028 is that you just destroyed the only system that actually developed leaders.
Middle managers made up one-third of all layoffs in 2023. Today, 41% of employees work at companies that cut management layers. And the coordination work didn’t just disappear. Some of it moved to senior leaders who were already underwater. Some of it stopped happening entirely. What also stopped — and what nobody is tracking — is the coaching. Your high-potential employees aren’t learning how to make tough calls anymore. There’s nobody with time to show them how to navigate organizational politics. Nobody is translating what the CEO means into what the team should actually do.
