What’s the Future of Middle Management?

But with the rise of AI and a trend toward flatter organizations, could these predictions soon come true? Perspectives from three groups of experts suggest that businesses will still need middle managers, particularly when it comes to helping frontline employees shift their roles amid rapid technological and business strategy changes.

But it is possible we may need fewer of them in this new environment.

There has been no shortage of questions and predictions about the end of middle management—from the pages of HBR in 2011 to the BBC four years later. Despite this, the proportion of middle managers has actually grown, making up 13% of the U.S. labor force in 2022, up from 9.2% in 1983.

More recently, however, there have been new warnings about the demise of this role. Gartner predicts that through 2026, “20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their organizational structure, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions.” Forty-four percent of U.S. professionals say that their company has cut back on manager-level roles, according to a new Korn Ferry report. And with comparatively high rates of burnout and unhappiness among middle managers—a new Gallup survey finds that managers are experiencing the sharpest decline in engagement—you have to wonder whether something is amiss with what companies are tasking these employees to do.

To help unpack these trends, we reached out to three groups of experts and asked: What’s the future of middle management, really? Here are their answers, edited for clarity. 

From Line Managers to Agents of Change

Raffaella Sadun is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at HBS and Jorge Tamayo is an assistant professor at HBS. Their current research examines the pivotal role of middle managers in driving performance disparities within firms.

Organizations today face significant technological and competitive shifts that are reshaping how they operate. Advances in generative AI are no longer confined to routine tasks; they now encroach on white-collar, managerial functions, challenging the assumption that these roles are insulated from automation. At the same time, the need for customer-centricity has never been more pressing. To remain competitive, organizations must reduce the bureaucratic distance between senior leadership and end customers, enabling greater agility and responsiveness.

One response to these shifts has been the call for delayering—the removal of middle management to improve productivity, agility, and employee motivation. But this overlooks a crucial reality: middle managers have never been more important. In times of transformation, they 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 are uniquely positioned to detect shifts in customer needs and relay this critical information to decision-makers. In times of heightened uncertainty, when organizations must rapidly refine their value propositions, this feedback loop becomes indispensable.

Second, middle managers serve as coaches and mentors, translating strategic shifts into action at the ground level. As technological change 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, and supporting workers as they navigate career paths within organizations. They also act as key intermediaries in supervising and interpreting AI-driven tasks, ensuring that automation enhances—rather than replaces—human expertise.

While eliminating middle management would be counterproductive, 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 finds that middle managers must develop new skills and embrace new responsibilities. Their role is shifting from oversight to facilitation, from monitoring to capability-building.

In essence, middle managers must become change agents.

The problem is, in many organizations, middle managers are not empowered to perform this role. 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 easily be automated. This misallocation of responsibilities dramatically reduces their potential impact. 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 to make these shifts. The increasing emphasis on “soft skills” training—so essential for coaching and motivation—has not been matched by consistent quality in content and delivery. Furthermore, middle managers will also require technical upskilling to stay ahead of automation. As AI assumes responsibility for lower-level problem-solving, managers must shift their focus to higher-order challenges, developing analytical and strategic skills that make them complementary to, rather than substitutable by, technology.

Beyond training, another barrier to effective middle management lies in how 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—without considering whether they have the ability to mentor, coordinate, or drive change. Worse, managerial success is often measured in ways that fail to capture their most critical contributions. If organizations do not assess and incentivize mentoring, coaching, and cross-functional collaboration, they will struggle to unlock the full potential of their middle managers.

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.

From Supervisors to Stewards of Digital Transformation

Zahira Jaser is an associate professor at the University of Sussex Business School and the author of the HBR article, “The Real Value of Middle Managers.”

In the era of digitization and algorithmic management_,_ technology is increasingly designed to make decisions that were once the responsibility of managers (e.g., organizing shifts, controlling quality, and performance management). Consequently, there may be an expectation that fewer middle managers are needed, particularly those in supervisory roles.

However, an analysis of 34 million job postings over 14 years reveals not only a marked increase in the number of managers, but also that the role of middle managers has already begun to evolve, necessitating more collaborative skills than supervisory ones due to constant change and innovation. As a qualitative researcher who has interviewed hundreds of middle managers, this resonates with my findings, particularly in the vital role middle managers play in successful digital transformations.

My latest research for the Digit Research Centre, with colleagues Diego Campagnolo and Martina Gianecchini from the University of Padova, shows that middle managers are developing skills and practices that emphasize the human aspect of implementing technology changes. These practices evolve across three main dimensions: top-down, bottom-up, and across boundaries.

Top-down influence sees managers implementing digital strategies that govern workers’ activities. Our research at a manufacturing plant in Italy—which, to contend with high labor costs compared to other locations worldwide, had to undergo a significant digital transformation to ensure improvements in productivity and quality—found that middle managers played a crucial role in the top-down implementation effort. These managers had to persuade workers to adapt to the new digitized lines of production. They also had to downplay the perceived threat of the technology in three key ways: by patiently assisting their longest-tenured employees in reskilling, by creatively redesign some roles, and by helping the company execute job reductions and a hiring freeze in a sensitive way. Thus, while the introduction of a technology could have easily be viewed by employees as surveillance, it was instead embraced as transformative and became part of the plant’s DNA due to the actions of middle managers.

The changes were also driven by a bottom-up influence. By listening to the concerns of people on the ground, the middle managers were able to gain workers’ trust and improve overall plant success. To do this, they made the explicit decision not to use every piece of data that resulted from every action a worker took to manage performance. This helped reduce the perceived threat of surveillance. But if the data indicated a trend in poor performance, the manager’s role was to investigate what had occurred in a specific part of production and discuss the on-the-ground facts with employees. In many instances, managers informed me that these discussions resulted in faster production optimization and were crucial in conveying the voice of employees upwards and translating it into strategy. Interestingly, they also gave managers a window into workers’ psychosocial issues (e.g., stress, childcare concerns, etc.), which, when addressed, improved job performance as well.

Finally, middle managers played a key role in cross-boundary influence. As managers developed these new practices with their workers, they attracted the curiosity of other colleagues. In conversations with these colleagues, encouraged by top managers, new ways of working cross-pollinated to other departments.

As technology becomes increasingly integrated into the workplace, there will need to be greater managerial attention into how these tools affect people. As a result, it is likely that the middle manager of the future will be a highly sophisticated, collaborative individual who brings empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychosocial skills to environments that risk turning workers into “cyberized” beings. Therefore, my verdict is: Long live the middle manager!

From Villains to Vital (at a Reasonable Number)

Diane Gherson is the former chief human resources officer of IBM, a director of Kraft Heinz, and a senior adviser at Boston Consulting Group. She is also the coauthor of the HBR article, “Managers Can’t Do It All.”

Reviled as extra baggage and ridiculed as petty bureaucrats slowing things down, middle managers have long been the villains of corporate culture. The keepers of policies, programs, precedents, controls, and compliance, they are in direct conflict with the “move fast and break things” leadership philosophy that has taken hold in many companies in the tech industry and beyond. Most recently, they have been targeted for layoffs by Amazon, Meta, UPS, Salesforce, X, and Bayer—all aiming to flatten the hierarchy to increase agility, pushing decision-making to lower levels in the organization

In my career, I have experienced first-hand the tension between moving fast and middle management pushback. Years ago, I hired a top executive to disrupt a sleepy department. He came with a new way of working—agile—that reconfigured work into iterative sprints and required co-working in a shared workplace. Frustrated with the slowness of our real estate and finance managers to respond to his requests to take down walls in the physical workspace, he showed up one day with a chain saw. I saw his frustration, and yet I also understood that middle management were doing their jobs, ensuring compliance with building permits, budgets, and square foot per employee policies.

The issue was that they did not jointly own the same outcomes. The middle managers were rewarded for achieving functional goals, zero policy violations and meeting their budgets, and the easiest way to accomplish that was to resist change. It was not until we locked all the relevant middle managers in a room to solve the problem together that we were able to overcome the deadlock with a creative solution. This could not have happened with the chainsaw—or without the middle managers in the room.

Another reason for vilification of middle management is that many organizations are not vigilant to contain the size of this layer. “Middle manager creep” is natural, where for many good reasons we might add a VP reporting to a VP, or a manager with 1–2 direct reports—and soon the middle management population mushrooms out of control. To control creep, organization can apply maxims like a fixed ratio of managers to employees (15% at Amazon) or caps on the number of management layers and minimum spans of control (typically, 6–10 direct reports). Other tactics include rigorous headcount management, or “up or out” talent strategies to make room for promotions of high potential leaders.

To be sure, technology has already disintermediated many of the roles of middle managers, taking them out of the loop for communications and coordination, and reducing their administrative tasks. Video and townhalls directly connect CEOs with their entire companies, and internal digital forums democratize access to information. Platforms like Slack and Jira enable employees from different units to find each other, self-coordinate, and collaborate on tasks. Increasingly, AI is automating many of the approval, audit, and reporting roles of the middle manager, and it’s entirely possible that this layer of responsibilities can be delegated in a flatter organization.

So, should the role endure? Peter Drucker’s work frequently emphasizes the critical role of managers—especially middle managers—in translating organizational objectives into action. His seminal books, such as The Practice of Management (1954) and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), discuss how managers serve as the crucial link between top management’s strategic vision and the operational realities of the organization. This element of the middle management role is not so easily marked for extinction. As organizations contend with an ever-growing list of uncertainties and change, middle managers are devoting time to helping their teams understand how to align with the company strategy, resetting priorities and re-allocating budgets and resources, and often buffering their frontline workers from the hard-edged messages that can come from the top.

We have already learned the hard lessons of abandoning these tasks. At one time or another, companies like Zappos, Valve, and GitHub took out middle management and implemented some form of agile work models. As these organizations scaled, employees reported feeling disoriented in the absence of clear alignment with corporate objectives or where there was misalignment among unit goals, and the lack of middle managers compromised the ability to coordinate among engineering, legal, marketing, sales, and other departments on key projects. Other organizations such as GE under Jack Welch or X under Elon Musk dramatically reduced middle management without changing work methods. There, employees reported siloed departments and burnout, and managers experienced additional strain due to differing interpretations of their mandate, without a uniform approach to prioritizing work, or without someone to optimize talent (personalities and skillsets) to get new work done in the most effective way possible. In the end, these companies came to rely on direct mandates from the top, with leadership often becoming a bottleneck for approvals.

In the end, perhaps Drucker was right: we do need middle managers. But we just may need fewer of them.