Middle management is shrinking and the same role may not return; experience needs to be used differently

A decline in management jobs may reflect more than an ordinary economic cycle. According to the cited data, the number of direct reports per manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, and 41 percent of employees in a Korn Ferry survey said their organization had reduced management layers. At the same time, part of coordination, reporting and control work is moving into digital systems and AI-based tools. When a company eliminates a position, does not refill it and distributes the team among other managers, this is not simply a temporary vacancy. The organizational design itself is changing. For someone who loses such a role, searching for an identical position at another company may therefore not be the most effective strategy. A job title can disappear faster than the abilities built over years. A manager may know how to coordinate people across departments, resolve complex conflicts, translate strategy into concrete work, manage change or identify risks. Those capabilities remain valuable in an organization with fewer management layers, but they may move into project leadership, internal consulting, specialist work or temporary team leadership. A practical career inventory should therefore not begin with a list of previous titles. For every significant experience, it is more useful to describe the problem, the decision, the capability used and the measurable result. “I led a department” is difficult to transfer. “I aligned three teams, removed two approval levels and introduced a new handoff of accountability” shows more specific value. Another change is the need to be closer to the work itself. If automated tools take over status collection and part of reporting, managers cannot base their value mainly on passing information between upper and lower levels. They need enough understanding of the customer, product, technology or decision problem to intervene where the system is insufficient. This does not mean returning to daily specialist work, but connecting leadership with professional context. Companies also need to account for the consequences of flattening. More direct reports reduce the time available for each person and may limit development, feedback or conflict resolution. Removing a management layer is therefore not automatically a saving for the organization as a whole. Leadership needs to check whether decisions actually became faster and whether the eliminated role’s work was taken over by a system, another person or simply an overloaded manager. For managers, the main conclusion is a change in perspective: career security is no longer provided by a particular rung of the organizational ladder. A portfolio of capabilities that can be applied across several different types of role is more valuable. Key terms Organizational flattening: Reducing the number of management layers and increasing the number of employees under one manager. Transferable capability: A skill usable across different roles and organizational designs regardless of the original job title. Coordination work: Collecting, passing and checking information between people and departments, which can be partly automated.

Middle management is shrinking and the same role may not return; experience needs to be used differently

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