Get Rid of Your Managers at Your Peril

I get a little worried when lots of smart people start saying the same thing without any disagreement. Right now, the thing that doesn’t feel fully thought through is the idea that middle managers need to go away.

And it is everyone. Mark Zuckerberg called it the “Great Flattening” and expanded spans of control across Meta. Andy Jassy wrote a memo committing Amazon to 15 percent more individual contributors per manager. Jack Dorsey and Brian Armstrong talk about an AI “intelligence layer” that coordinates work directly. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, one in five organizations will use AI to flatten their hierarchy, eliminating more than half of existing middle management roles. Manager headcount at public companies is already down 6 percent since 2022.

The logic goes like this: managers exist to pass information up and down the org chart. Status updates, reporting, translating strategy into assignments. AI now does that connective work automatically, so the layer can go.

Part of that is true. The information-relay portion of the manager’s job is dying, and it should. Nobody will miss the Tuesday status meeting.

But relay work was never the whole job, and the parts that remain are about to get heavier. After working with 150+ leadership teams on AI adoption, my two cents: managers are needed more than ever. Four reasons.

Agents need managers. Every agent deployed inside a company needs someone to scope its work, review its output, and decide what actually ships. That is management. The span of control is expanding, and now it includes non-humans. A team of eight people running thirty agents has more to supervise, not less. Delete the manager and you haven’t flattened the org. You’ve left the agents unsupervised.

Training runs through managers. AI fluency does not spread bottom-up on its own. In every company we’ve worked with, the teams that got fluent had a manager who made it a priority, modeled the behavior, and made time for people to learn. A memo from the CEO starts the process. A manager finishes it.

Change management is behavioral, and behavior is local. Adopting AI means people changing how they work: how they write things down, what they share, which habits they retire. That kind of change gets pushed through one team at a time, by someone close enough to notice who’s stuck. No tool does this. The layer everyone wants to cut is the layer that makes the transformation actually happen.

Someone has to tell signal from noise. Every org now has employees who have rebuilt how they work around AI and are quietly moving the dial, and employees who look busy but are just burning tokens. From a dashboard, the two are indistinguishable. Usage is up in both cases. Distinguishing real leverage from expensive activity takes judgment and proximity, and that judgment lives in the management layer.

Here is the pattern I’d watch for. The companies flattening hardest are optimizing for a world where AI replaces coordination. The companies that win will be the ones that redeploy managers toward what AI creates more of: agents to supervise, skills to build, habits to change, and output to evaluate.