Cutting Managers Is the Easy Part: What Breaks and What Defines the Next Decade

For decades, the manager was the delivery system for how organizations supported their people. That model is broken. We're in the early days of figuring out how to deliver it differently, and the companies that get there first are going to define the next decade of how organizations operate.

Let me explain what I mean.

Over the past several years, companies have been restructuring around fewer management layers. Amazon set  explicit IC-to-manager ratio targets and the layoffs keep coming. Meta converted managers into individual contributors. According to Korn Ferry, 41% of professionals say their companies have already trimmed management layers, and middle management job postings have dropped 40% since 2022.

The justification is usually to reduce layers, cut bureaucracy, and speed up decision-making. But I think the story is simpler: the old model wasn't working. Organizations have been pouring money into management layers for decades, and a lot of them were getting mediocre results. 

Managers are stretched too thin to coach anyone. They were once great ICs, but many suck at dealing with people. Often they create the very burnout and disengagement they were hired to prevent. Sound familiar? It's a slow but sure realization. Companies have been watching the return on that investment erode for years, and now it's time to rearchitect the way things work.

The question isn't whether to have fewer managers, but what you're going to do about all the work those managers were supposed to be doing.

The structural problem nobody talks about

Here's the thing about managers that nobody frames correctly. Organizations buy managerial capacity in large, discrete units. You hire someone full-time at $150K+ even though the moments that matter are episodic. There's no such thing as a fractional manager, because the moments that matter most can't be scheduled in advance. So we buy the whole package and hope the person is good at the parts that count. The bad, but not surprising, news is that a lot of them aren't. And when that's the case, we’re paying full price for someone that makes things worse.

What gets left behind

When companies flatten, some of the manager's work shifts up to executives, some moves sideways into peer coordination, some down to ICs. Automation and AI absorb a good chunk of what's left: workflow tools, project management, scheduling, reporting. That covers coordination and execution pretty well. But there's an entire category of work that managers were supposed to do that nobody is rebuilding. That's where the damage shows up months later.

The coaching conversation that lands at the right time. The confidence rebuilding after a rough quarter. Noticing that someone's been quieter in meetings and asking the right question before it becomes a resignation letter. Helping people navigate the friction of working with other humans every day. Insulating organizational anxiety during a reorg so it doesn't cascade into a team crisis.

None of that got replaced, and it shows. Korn Ferry found that 37% of employees in flattened orgs feel directionless. That's not a morale problem, it's a gap where support used to be.

This is bigger than flattening

What most companies are missing is that this is an opportunity to redesign how organizations actually operate. The few doing this well aren't just removing managers – they're building fluid structures that assemble teams around business needs, projects, and products. Like the Avengers

Look at what Haier has done. The Chinese home appliance giant broke a 70,000-person company into more than 4,000 self-managing micro-enterprises. Each with its own decision-making authority over strategy, hiring, and compensation. There are no traditional management layers. Employees form small entrepreneurial units that collaborate through ecosystems rather than reporting chains. 

It's not a flat org chart projected onto the old model. It's a different, fluid architecture, and it's been running at scale for over a decade.

Even in this model, every employee needs access to mentoring, subject matter expertise, performance feedback, help navigating interpersonal conflict, someone they trust to talk to when work is tough. The question is how you deliver all of that without going back to the old model that wasn't working in the first place.

A systems design problem

This is what gets me excited, because this looks like a systems design problem. The old model wasn't broken because managers suck – it was broken because the architecture was wrong. You can't bundle all of those functions into one overloaded human being, assign them 15 or 25 direct reports, and expect consistent results. 

The redesigned model still needs to deliver these functions. 24/7, on demand, at each person's pace. And this is where AI can do something that wasn't possible before.

Not surveillance dressed up as coaching. Not a chatbot that answers PTO policy questions. Something that strengthens employee resilience, capability, and agency — consistently and at a scale that no human manager with 25 direct reports could match.

The split that's coming

These changes will continue, and accelerate, especially as AI adoption accelerates in the enterprise. The companies that understand the human side of work — and offer support systems that give their people a place to go for coaching and development — will end up with something better than what they had before. The rest will see their best performers leave for places that invested in the full transformation.

I think the future belongs to organizations where people are supported not by layers of overhead, but by systems designed for how work happens.

That's what we built Tough Day to do. An AI Employee Success Partner that provides the kind of support that manager-lite organizations need to function. The kind of support that the old model never delivered well.

We think it matters.