The Quiet Collapse of Management

There is a growing belief in modern executive leadership that companies move faster by reducing management. It shows up in phrases like flattening the organization, empowering teams, or becoming more efficient through AI and tooling. On the surface, it sounds like progress. Underneath, it is often a misunderstanding of how work actually gets done.

What is happening in many organizations is not that management is being improved. It is being weakened. The people responsible for turning intent into delivery are being asked to do more with less authority, less time, and less space to think. And the system is starting to show the strain in ways that are hard to ignore once you look past the surface.

Amazon made this direction explicit when Andy Jassy told employees the company wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers and flatten the organization. That statement is not unusual anymore. It reflects a broader shift across large companies toward fewer managers, wider spans, and a belief that teams can operate more independently if leadership removes layers.

The problem is that this line of thinking starts with a flawed assumption. It treats management as if it were mostly administrative overhead, when in reality it is one of the core mechanisms that enable organizations to function in real-world conditions.

When managers stop leading and start only serving the higher-ups

The role of a manager is often misunderstood because much of their value is not visible in a clean org chart. Good managers operate in the messy middle where strategy meets reality. They translate direction into something teams can actually act on. They resolve conflicts between priorities that were never fully aligned. They absorb noise so teams can focus. They help people make better decisions in situations where there is no clear playbook.

That work becomes even more important as organizations grow more complex, yet the role itself is being reshaped in ways that pull managers away from it. In many companies, managers are no longer primarily accountable for enabling delivery. They are increasingly responsible for feeding leadership visibility. Their time is consumed by status updates, alignment meetings, executive briefings, and the constant effort of making work legible upward.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index makes this shift visible in the data. Drawing on survey responses from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, along with large-scale productivity signals, the report found that about 60% of meetings are unscheduled or ad hoc. The broader pattern is a workday dominated by interruption, context switching, and reactive coordination. Microsoft described this as an “infinite workday,” where the boundaries needed for focused work are constantly eroded.

That environment does not happen by accident. It is what organizations create when they optimize to keep leadership informed rather than to enable teams to deliver. Managers, in turn, become the interface for that system. Instead of reducing friction, they are managing it.

This is also why the idea that “your manager is your coach” so often falls flat in practice. Coaching is real work. It requires time, attention, and sufficient stability to help someone develop judgment. Yet most organizations are increasing spans of control, increasing reporting demands, and tightening delivery pressure, all while expecting managers to coach more effectively.

Gallup’s research makes the gap clear. In its long-running workplace studies, based on millions of employees, Gallup found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. More recent data show that only about 27% of managers globally report being engaged in their roles, a decline that reflects the pressure being placed on this layer. At the same time, Gallup reports that organizations investing in manager development, particularly coaching capability, can see engagement improvements of up to 18%. The takeaway is straightforward. Coaching works when it is supported as a capability. It fails when it is treated as a label applied to an overloaded role.

The big-company examples should be warnings, not models

One of the more dangerous dynamics right now is that large companies are presenting their own structural experiments as proof of a better way to operate. In reality, many of these examples highlight the risks of weakening management without redesigning the system around it.

Amazon’s push to flatten the organization was framed as a way to remove bureaucracy and speed decision-making. But bureaucracy is rarely the result of having managers. It is usually the result of unclear decision rights, overlapping priorities, excessive approvals, and leadership demands for constant visibility. If those conditions persist, reducing the number of managers does not eliminate bureaucracy. It simply redistributes it. Decisions move upward, escalation increases, and the remaining managers absorb more of the confusion.

Block, the financial technology company formerly known as Square, provides a more visible example of where this thinking leads. In March 2026, Business Insider reported that Jack Dorsey’s AI-driven reorganization of Block is reshaping the company around three roles: individual contributors, “directly responsible individuals,” and “player-coaches,” with fewer traditional managers. The shift, which followed layoffs affecting roughly 4,000 employees, reflects Dorsey’s push to reduce layers between himself and the rest of the organization.

The reason this matters is not the reorganization itself, but the tradeoff it represents. When companies compress leadership, delivery, and coordination into fewer roles, they are not removing complexity. They are concentrating on it. That concentration often shows up later as unclear accountability, less consistent coaching, and a heavier burden on individuals to navigate a system that no longer provides the same level of support.

Boeing’s situation is far more serious, but it reinforces the same underlying lesson. After the 737-9 door-plug incident in early 2024, both regulators and internal reviews emphasized the need to strengthen safety culture, improve quality oversight, and ensure employees could raise concerns without fear. Boeing reported that “Speak Up” submissions increased by more than 500% in the first two months of 2024 compared with the same period the year before. That kind of increase is not a sign of a suddenly healthier system. It is a sign that critical information was not moving effectively through the organization before the crisis forced attention onto it.

In complex systems, one of the core functions of management is making sure reality travels upward early enough to matter. When that connective layer is weakened, the organization does not become more efficient. It becomes more fragile.

For small and mid-sized companies, the lesson here is not to copy what large tech firms are doing. It is to understand why those firms can survive experiments that smaller organizations cannot. Large companies have the margin to absorb inefficiencies and structural confusion. Smaller organizations do not. When they flatten too aggressively, widen spans too far, and turn managers into overloaded player-coaches, the impact shows up quickly in delivery, customer experience, and retention.

What executive teams need to face

The uncomfortable truth is that many executive teams are misdiagnosing their own problems. When delivery slows or alignment breaks down, management is often blamed. In many cases, management is part of the system absorbing the consequences of how the organization has been designed.

Managers are being asked to deliver outcomes without real authority over priorities. They are expected to coach without time. They are told to empower teams while operating inside systems that still centralize decisions at the top. These are not minor inconsistencies. They are structural contradictions, and they produce exactly what you would expect: slower delivery, blurred accountability, burned-out managers, and teams responsible for results without the ability to shape them.

Fixing this does not require rebuilding a heavy hierarchy, but it does require a more honest approach to how organizations function. Management needs to be treated as part of the delivery system, not as overhead. Decision-making needs to move closer to the work before layers are removed. Spans of control need to reflect the actual expectations placed on managers, especially if coaching and development are taken seriously. And organizations need to reduce the amount of internal coordination that exists primarily to serve leadership visibility rather than customer outcomes.

The broader shift is one of orientation. Teams should not exist to feed dashboards or satisfy executive curiosity. Leadership should exist to create the conditions where teams can deliver effectively. Managers are one of the primary ways that happens.

Right now, too many organizations have that relationship reversed.

The real risk

The risk is not that management is disappearing. It is that it is being hollowed out while expectations remain the same. Organizations still expect coordination, accountability, development, and performance, but they are weakening the layer that makes those things possible.

For a while, that can be masked by strong individuals, market momentum, or sheer effort. Over time, it shows up in slower delivery, weaker capability, and a system that feels increasingly reactive.

Modern executive leadership is not failing because managers have become ineffective. It is failing because too many leaders want the benefits of strong management without creating the conditions that allow it to exist. They want speed without redesign, accountability without authority, and coaching without time.

That combination can look efficient from a distance. But, up close, it is the beginning of something much harder to recover from.