Middle Management Is Not Broken. The Operating System Is.

We flattened the organization and doubled the scope of the people in the middle, then asked them to keep running a command-and-control routine built for a much smaller world.

Ask a manager what actually consumed their week and you'll hear the same answer: not strategy, not coaching, not the customer - calendar, reviews, approvals, status decks, check-ins that exist because the system expects them.

Over the past decade we've removed layers with real conviction. Spans of control that were once eight are now sixteen, sometimes thirty. We called it flattening and efficiency, and the intent was sound. What we didn't do is change the operating system sitting on top of those managers. We doubled the denominator and left the numerator of obligations untouched.

The Arithmetic Nobody Ran

At a span of eight, the annual performance ritual might cost a manager forty hours - drafting, calibrating, delivering, defending. Painful, survivable. Double the team and the ritual doesn't scale gracefully, it compounds: bigger calibration sessions, more narratives, longer distribution debates — all inside the same twenty-four hours. Add the monthly career conversation per report, the engagement survey action plan, learning tracking, travel and requisition approvals, the status report that rolls into a report nobody reads. None of it was designed for a span of sixteen.

The Honest Diagnosis

Middle managers aren't burning out for lack of resilience. They're burning out because we ask them to personally carry obligations a modern organization should distribute. Worse, much of what they carry is performative - a review that surprises no one, a career conversation that happens because the calendar says Tuesday. We're paying a high price in human capacity to maintain the appearance of control.

The fix: Move Obligation to More Peer Based

If a manager can't be the sole source of feedback, development, recognition, coordination, and accountability for twenty people, stop pretending they are. Make those obligations peer-to-peer, and treat contribution as an expectation at every level, not a privilege of position.

Peer feedback becomes the primary channel; the manager curates and handles outliers instead of manufacturing sixteen narratives from secondhand information.
Career conversations are owned by the employee - they set the agenda and record the commitments; the manager is a resource, not the author.
Recognition moves peer-to-peer and public - it's more accurate and more believed than anything that only flows down the line.
Teams commit to each other, not just upward.
Audit the inherited calendar for every recurring obligation, ask: was this designed for a span of eight? If yes, redesign, delegate, or delete it.

Where this Goes Wrong

Three risks: peer accountability without shared standards becomes politeness or policing - agree on what "good" looks like first. Distributed responsibility can become diffused responsibility - if everyone owns it, no one does; name owners. And this thinking can become cover for another round of cuts - the goal is restoring capacity, not harvesting it.

The Ask

Flattening was the easy half. The hard half - redesigning the obligations those layers used to absorb - is the part most organizations haven't honestly started. Don't ask your managers to be more resilient. Ask which rituals and processes still deserve their time, and find the courage to distribute or kill the rest.

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

Lorne

Garrett’s View: Sometimes I’ll daydream of the simple transaction at a brick & mortar. Remember when you went to buy an item with cash, received a receipt, and was told to have a nice day? Two steps, that was it. Now, purchasing the same item can be done online, but let’s pretend we’re still going to a store. If the establishment even accepts it, I’m probably not using cash, so I can use a debit card, credit card, or Apple Pay. I can use the physical card, or my phone. I then am often asked to donate, tip or pay for a bag. I will likely receive an email I’ll never read that confirms my purchase. I’ll then continue to get multiple emails, texts, and other notifications for future sales and products. I’ll never unsubscribe. The product will then appear on my algorithm, I’ll likely follow them on social media, and be asked to download their app. It’s even probable that I’m forgetting or leaving out steps, but that’s 16 things to think about when it used to take two to acquire the exact same thing. Each new convenience layer never replaces the old one, it just adds to it. It appears more progressive, however what are we doing to ourselves? Our organizations can probably ask themselves the same question.

AI Response: Lorne's central claim — that spans widened while the obligations riding on top of them didn't shrink — holds up against current data. Gallup's most recent workforce analysis found the average number of direct reports per manager climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, a roughly 50% increase in team size since Gallup first started measuring in 2013, and separately noted the change hasn't been uniform — a relatively small share of very large teams is pulling the national average up while the median manager still oversees five to six people. Deloitte's 2023 benchmarking found the average Fortune 500 span of control had grown to 9.7 direct reports, up from 7.1 in 2010. Gartner's own 2025 organization-design research is blunter still: three-quarters of the CHROs it surveyed said their managers are overwhelmed by increased job responsibilities, and a separate 2026 Gartner brief found that even as companies lean on AI to try to shrink manager headcount, AI hasn't reduced the time managers actually spend on tasks. That combination — wider spans, unchanged workload, and leadership itself acknowledging the strain — is exactly the "we doubled the denominator and left the numerator untouched" argument Lorne is making, just with the numbers behind it.

Middle Management Is Not Broken. The Operating System Is.

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