The Future of Middle Management
Point—Counterpoint
One thing that I’ve been pushing back on in the Agile community for well over a decade is the tendency for everyone to bash, stereotype, and vilify middle managers. I thought I’d share two perspectives, seemingly at the endpoints of this discussion, and then weigh in with my own thoughts. I hope you enjoy the journey.
Point
I was reading this article--
What’s the Future of Middle Management?
by Gretchen Gavett and Vasundhara Sawhney
In Harvard Business Review, this quote on page five stood out to me—
Middle management is not an obstacle to agility—it is a cornerstone of it. Organizations that recognize this will be best positioned to thrive in an era of rapid change. Firms that fail to rethink and reskill their middle managers risk losing a critical layer of leadership precisely when they need it most.
And I’ve been noodling on it for several days.
Counterpoint
I wish I could share a link to the newsletter article from Corporate Rebels, but they don’t provide links for non-members.
Their May 8th newsletter was a direct response to the above article. Essentially, it was an opposite reflection and an (acknowledged) bit of middle management bashing. The author was Joost Minnaar, one of their co-founders.
If you’d like to sign up for their newsletter and access this article—
https://www.corporate-rebels.com/newsletter-linkedin-pim
Here are a few snippets to give you a sense of it…
This morning, I read a piece in Harvard Business Review — the apex of thoughtful, measured, data-rich corporate discourse — titled “What’s the Future of Middle Management?”
Spoiler: It's not extinction.
The authors make a reasonable case: middle managers are still vital because of their unique position in the organizational food chain.
But — and it's a big but — to stay relevant, they need to shrink in numbers and evolve in function.
Less compliance cop, more talent developer.
Less command-and-control, more coach-and-collaborator.
They're supposed to foster creativity, protect frontline teams from top-down lunacy, and facilitate upskilling.
My take? Feels good. Sounds right. Doesn’t hold.
And this one
4. Same old case studies, same old fear.
GitHub. Valve. Zappos. The tired trio of “flatter orgs gone wrong” is wheeled out like ghost stories at corporate campfires.
Yes, there were failures. No, they weren’t the whole story.
What these cautionary tales ignore: the dozens — hundreds — of organizations thriving with self-management, radical transparency, and decentralized teams.
We’ve seen them. We’ve worked with them. In fact, we’ve designed an intensive 6-week masterclass around them.
They’re not theoretical — they’re real, they scale, and they work.
Bottom line? Cherry-picking failure stories doesn’t prove the model is broken. It proves your bias.
Josh Anderson’s perspective
While noodling on this topic, I explored it with my podcast colleague and friend, Josh Anderson. Not only did it inspire him to write this article, but it was also explored on our recent Meta-cast.
I appreciate Josh’s, Leveling Up Instead of Flattening Out, perspective.
Rachel Robbin’s perspective
Clearly a bit of serendipity, in a recent post entitled The Translation Layer: Why Middle Leadership Is the System’s Critical Organ, Vision inspires, but translation makes it breathe.
Rachel Robbins came at this from a perspective that I appreciated. She talked about middle management role as a translator between senior leadership and their teams. Not only have I seen this in action many times myself, but I’ve seen it be a difference maker that led to better aligned teams and much higher performance.
I also appreciate the level of detailed exploration and nuance of the article.
Michael Ferrara’s perspective
In his article entitled—Rewired and Reimagined: How AI and Agile Thinking Are Reshaping Middle Management, Michael Ferrar shared this example story—
Bayer Pharmaceuticals offers a striking example. In a bold move, the company eliminated 40% of its U.S. middle management roles and replaced them with self-directed teams operating in 90-day sprints. The results? A 23% increase in business growth in North America, with the U.S. contributing even more than the reported regional average.
The shift wasn’t just about headcount reduction. It was a rethink of what management is for. Bureaucratic layers—where decisions passed upward through chains of command—were replaced with autonomous teams empowered to act on their own insights. Tasks like expense report approvals, which once consumed significant managerial bandwidth (Bayer processed 120,000 of them annually), were eliminated or automated.
Yet not all managers were dismissed. Many were reassigned as individual contributors, retaining their compensation but shedding administrative responsibilities. Freed from bureaucratic drag, they
reported greater job satisfaction and impact.
At the same time, the role of managers who remained was transformed. No longer expected to police processes, these leaders now serve as coaches, catalysts, and architects of team success. It’s a shift from managing compliance to enabling performance.
In short, middle management isn’t disappearing. It’s being rewired for a world where decisions must be faster, roles more fluid, and leadership more empowering than ever before.
I agree with his final point about rewiring middle management, and I’d encourage you to read the entire article.
My general take
First, I think there is far too much middle manager/management bashing in the world, both in the organizational disruption world of Corporate Rebels and in the Agile ways-of-working world I live in. IMHO, middle managers are not all bad, and they don’t need to be extinguished. Period.
Second, most of Corporate Rebels example companies that they use as “examples” of hierarchical compression are quite small—perhaps 50 – 3000 employees. Sure, they use a few large companies to offset this skew, Haier is an example, but largely their examples are companies of less than a thousand employees.
Now, if Joost and company parachute into Ford or Google or JPMorgan Chase and successfully apply their strategies, then I’d sit up and blast all middle managers 😉
That said, I admire Corporate Rebels and the essence, not the literalness, of their messaging, which is why I’ve followed them for so long.
My sense of the future of middle management is much closer to the HBR article and other views. You see, I’ve read quite a few posts and articles lately that reflect a trend towards—
Flattening organizations
Firing / laying off middle managers
Reframing middle managers to individual contributor roles
And generally, alluding to the extinction of the “Middle Manager.”
But this article made more sense than all the reactive doom and gloom. Instead of firing or demoting them, what if we focused on rethinking their roles and reskilling them for these new roles?
Understand me. I do think organizations are moving and changing. But in this chaos of change, the current strategy seems to throw away the humans, especially the “managers.” Not only is that too harsh and simple a strategy, but think of the intellectual and business value lost when we discard middle managers.
Of course, it’s better to reimagine or rewire middle management and managers, just as it’s relevant to reimagine teams, teaming, and senior leadership. In essence, we need middle managers, and we need to stop the bashing.
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob.
Here are two related posts of mine—
And a related Corporate Rebels LI post—
And more manager negative “appreciation”—
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The complete eradication of all middle management layers is nonsense. Even Haier, the company that Corporate Rebels wrote an entire book about, still has at least three or four layers of management. Same with Nucor, the beloved American example. But four layers is very different from twelve.
I always say hierarchies are natural. We need them for abstraction. The human mind cannot cope with just an anarchy of 100,000 coworkers. No structure = cognitive overload. We want to be able to refer to teams, business units, and business groups to make sense of the world around us.
But remember the 10X Rule: when you aim to scale 10X, you'll have to reinvent everything. So, 1 manager on every 50 workers is radically different from 1 on every 5 workers. It requires a complete rethink of the company and the role of managers. For example, I've debated with people who are convinced that coaching and one-on-ones are essential middle management practices. My reply is simple: that doesn't scale. You'll never be able to get to 1 manager on 50 people that way.
"No middle managers" should be taken in the same vein as "no estimates." It's a challenge. How far are we able to get without relying on what we now have far too much of?
I know Joost and Pim. I believe that's what they mean as well.