The Manager Who Now Runs Twenty-Five People: What Flattening Does to a Leadership Team

The Twenty-Five Person Span

Somewhere in your company there is a manager whose job changed last year without anyone announcing it. The layer above her was removed, or the layer below her was automated, and she now has twenty-five people reporting in where she once had seven.

She is not an outlier. In Korn Ferry's Workforce 2025 "Power Shifts" survey of 15,000 professionals across ten countries, 41 per cent said their organisation had cut management layers. Gallup's span-of-control figures, as cited in 2026 coverage, show the average manager going from 10.9 direct reports to 12.1 in a single year, up from 8.2 when Gallup first measured it in 2013.

The Invisible Cost of Speed

The case for flattening is real and CEOs make it for sound reasons. Decisions move faster when there are fewer places to escalate. Coordination work, the status updates and the reporting, is exactly what software now does well. The cost is easier to see on a spreadsheet than the damage.

The damage shows up elsewhere. In the same survey, 37 per cent of employees said losing their managers had left them feeling directionless, and 43 per cent said leaders had become less aligned. Among US senior executives, 72 per cent reported feeling stretched beyond their capacity, because the coaching and context-setting that used to sit one level down had landed on them.

“The layer you remove also held the knowledge nobody wrote down: which customer is touchy, which supplier will really deliver on Friday.”

What This Means for an Indian CEO

There is no India-specific cut of the Korn Ferry data, so we won't pretend to have one. But the structure of many Indian mid-sized firms makes the lesson sharper, not softer. Where a promoter-led business has grown through a few trusted lieutenants, removing a middle layer can mean removing the people who held the informal knowledge: which customer is touchy, which supplier will really deliver on Friday.

Three Questions Before the Next Org Chart

First, what did the layer actually do that wasn't coordination? In most companies, a share of what middle managers do is judgment: hiring, coaching, calling a customer. Software doesn't take that over. If it disappears, it simply stops happening.

Second, who now does the developmental work? People grow into leaders by working under a manager who watches them. The firms removing layers today are also removing the bench that would have produced their 2030 department heads.

Third, what is the new ceiling on a manager's span, and who checks it? Twenty-five reports can work for a team doing near-identical tasks. It does not work for twenty-five people in twenty-five different situations.

Flattening is a decision. Leaving the consequences to chance is a choice too, just a less visible one.