‘Unbossing’ and ‘the Great Flattening’: Lessons on the risks of ditching middle management

The future isn’t about unbossing. It’s about rebossing – developing the human leadership that technology will never replace, writes Rebecca Houghton.

Meta made 2023 its “Year of Efficiency”. German pharmaceutical giant Bayer slashed layers of management, blaming hierarchy for corporate sluggishness. And Elon Musk? He’s casually swinging the axe across the US government under the banner of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The message is clear: middle management is out. Companies and governments are convinced they can run leaner, faster, and better without it.

It sounds bold. It sounds modern. It sounds like progress.

Except we’ve seen this reckless cost-cutting experiment before.

Since the 1980s, companies have recycled the same tired playbook: slash middle management under the banner of “rightsizing”, “downsizing”, or “restructuring”.

It’s the corporate equivalent of a fad diet – dramatic, headline-grabbing, and usually disastrous in the long term. But in tough economic times, chief financial officers start eyeing the biggest expense on the balance sheet: labour costs.

And middle management? An easy target.

But here’s the problem: when you strip out middle management, you don’t get a high-performance, self-sufficient workforce – you get chaos.

Google learnt this the hard way. So did Zappos.

Google’s Project Oxygen initially removed middle managers – only to bring them back. Zappos’ Holacracy experiment, which promised “no job titles, decentralised self-management”, was quietly rolled back – it didn’t work either. Why? Because people flounder without structure. Without regular feedback, motivation, and career development, employees weren’t empowered – they felt lost and quickly disengaged.

And yet, here we go again. According to Live Data Technologies, layoffs in the US are hitting middle management harder than ever. In 2023, nearly a third of all layoffs were managers. And in 2024? That number has surged to almost half.

But today’s layoffs are different from past waves – because this time, AI is in the mix.

AI is already replacing some traditional middle management tasks – administration, workflow management, workload balancing, resource allocation, and reporting. If that’s all your middle managers do, let’s be blunt: bring in the robots. But if you think that’s all middle managers do, or can do, then you’ve missed the lessons of those who went before you.

The best middle managers – the ones I call B-suite leaders – aren’t just pushing paper. They’re driving engagement, fostering development, and making sure company strategy actually turns into outcome.

B-suite leadership is about three core capabilities:

• Controlling the pace of work.
• Using the space to think.
• Making the case with influence.

Right now, most middle managers are bogged down in controlling the pace of work at the expense of everything else. But their real, high-impact responsibilities – motivating and developing people, giving feedback, organising collaborations, resolving conflicts, thinking strategically, influencing decisions, and designing solutions – these are what keep businesses running.

Let AI take over the admin. But cut middle managers entirely, and you cut out the leadership that AI can’t replace.

The lesson from Google and Zappos? You can do without bad middle managers, but you cannot do without good ones. And understanding that distinction is crucial.

Yes, the temptation to cut middle management is strong, especially in tough times. But instead of falling for the siren call of the “Great Flattening” or “Great Unbossing”, leaders should focus on rebossing – building the next generation of B-suite leaders who can do what AI and automation cannot.

The future isn’t about unbossing. It’s about rebossing – developing the human leadership that technology will never replace.

Rebecca Houghton is an author and the founder of BoldHR.