TLDR: Companies stripped out management layers to move faster, then handed the survivors far wider teams with the same tools and time. Speed stalls and manager wellbeing suffers unless support scales with span.
Flattening became a default management move after 2023, not a tech anomaly
I have watched the same slide appear in boardroom after boardroom since 2023: fewer layers, bigger teams, a promise of speed. What began as a Silicon Valley efficiency drive turned into a general operating instruction. The clearest evidence sits in payroll data rather than press releases. Across roughly 8,500 small and mid-sized employers, the analytics team at the payroll platform Gusto found nearly six individual contributors per manager in 2024, up from a little over three in 2019. That is a near doubling of the load each people manager carries, and it happened at ordinary firms, not just at the technology giants that made flattening famous.
The starting point matters. Bain research puts the everyday baseline at six to seven direct reports per manager, with eight or nine layers between the chief executive and the frontline. When a company removes two or three of those layers, the reports do not disappear. They redistribute upward, so the span of control for whoever remains stretches quickly. Delayering and widening are the same act viewed from two ends.
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