Middle Management Reinvented: From Bureaucracy to Agility

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Predictions about the demise of middle management aren't new, but with the rise of AI and a trend toward flatter organizations, could these predictions soon come true? This is What's the Future of Middle Management by Gretchen Gavitt and Vasandhara Hassani. It's from the April 2025 edition of Harvard Business Review. Well, there has been no shortage of questions and predictions about the end of middle management. I heard it when I was in the pharmaceutical industry.

I've heard it for the last 30 years, maybe. Despite this, the proportion of middle managers has actually grown, making up 13% of the U.S. Labor market in 2022, up from 9.2% in 1983. More recently, however, there's been new warnings about the demise of this role. Gartner predicts that through 2026, 20% of the organizations will use AI to flatten their organizational structure, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions.

Scary. 44% of U.S. Professionals say that their company has cut back on manager-level roles, according to new Corn Ferry report. And with comparably high rates of burnout and unhappiness among middle managers, a new Gallup survey finds that managers are experiencing the sharpest decline in engagement, even more so than their employees. You have to wonder whether something is amiss with what companies are tasking these employees to do.

So to help unpack these trends, this article actually talks about three different groups or three different kind of ideas around the future of middle management.

I'm just going to go over the first one. I think it's the best one that's the best argument and where I find the most value in this particular article. It is entitled, From Line Managers to Agents of Change. I really like that, From Line Managers to Agents of Change. So, essentially, to remain competitive, organizations must reduce the bureaucratic distance between senior leadership and the customer, right? So, enabling greater agility and responsiveness.

One response to these shifts has been the call for delayering or the removal of middle management to improve productivity, to increase agility, increase employee motivation, those types of things. But this overlooks a crucial reality. Middle managers have never been more important. In times of transformation, which if you're in any organization of any size, transformation is a daily issue that you have to face, right?

Middle managers play a vital role in shaping an organization's ability to adapt. Their significance rests on two key functions. First, as the link between frontline employees and senior leadership, middle managers have direct access to customer insights. They're uniquely positioned to detect shifts in customer needs and relay this critical information to decision makers.

In times of heightened uncertainty, when organizations have to rapidly refine their value propositions, This feedback loop becomes really quite indispensable. Now, second, middle managers also serve as the key functional coaches and mentors of the organization, translating strategic shifts into action at the ground. As technology changes and reshapes job roles, they guide employees through transitions, helping them acquire new skills and adapt to evolving responsibilities.

Recent research underscores this point. Middle managers play an essential role in motivating employees to pursue training, facilitating the development of human capital, supporting workers as they navigate career paths within organizations, and so much more. They also act as key intermediaries in supervising and interpreting various AI-driven tasks, ensuring that the automation enhances, not replaces, human expertise.

So while eliminating middle management would be counterproductive, and I believe that that's true, this does not mean that organizations can afford to maintain the status quo. As firms rethink their decision-making processes and organizational structures, our ongoing research, in this article at least, finds that middle managers must develop new skills and embrace new responsibilities. Their role is shifting from oversight to facilitation, from monitoring to capability or capacity building.

In essence, middle managers have to become change agents. The problem is, in many organizations, middle managers are not really empowered to perform this role. So, for example, instead of leveraging them to understand customer needs or to coach and motivate employees, companies often assign middle managers to routine administrative tasks that could be easily done by an admin function or simply automated.

This misallocation of responsibilities dramatically reduces the impact that a middle manager can have on the organization, Rather than supervising day-to-day processes. Middle managers should be guiding employees through skill transitions, facilitating collaboration across teams, and helping integrate new technologies into operations.

Even when organizations recognize the need for middle managers to take on these expanded roles, they often fail to provide the necessary training in order to make these shifts. The increasing emphasis on what we call soft skills training, so essential for coaching, so essential for motivation, has not really been matched by consistent quality in content and delivery. Furthermore, middle managers will also require upskilling in technical functions to stay ahead of automation.

As AI assumes responsibility for more lower-level problem-solving, managers have to shift their focus to higher-order challenges. Developing analytical and strategic skills that make them complementary to, rather than substitutable by, technology.

And beyond training, another barrier to effective middle management lies in how the organizations select and evaluate their managers. Many firms continue to promote individuals based on performance in unrelated tasks, such as rewarding top salespeople with managerial roles. We did that routinely when I was in the pharmaceutical industry. We make the best salespeople managers, and we created a double whammy on the organizations. We put a bad manager in place, and we took away a great salesperson.

So, we do this without considering whether they have the ability to mentor, to coordinate, or to drive change. Worse, managerial success is often measured in ways that fail to capture their most critical contribution. If organizations do not assess and incentivize mentoring, coaching, and cross-functional collaboration, they'll struggle to unlock the full potential of their middle managers. So, in summary, middle management is not an obstacle to agility.

It's the cornerstone of it, argues this article. Organizations that recognize this will be best positioned to thrive in an era of rapid change. Firms that fail to rethink and re-skill their middle managers risk losing a critical layer of leadership precisely when they need it most. Hope you enjoyed that. And until next time we meet in the Manager Lab, do good work.