Middle Management Is Disappearing. Korn Ferry Says 41% of Companies Already Pulled the Trigger.

There's a term making the rounds in HR circles this year that sounds almost too tidy for what it describes: the Great Flattening. Korn Ferry's Workforce 2025 "Power Shifts" survey, which polled 15,000 professionals across ten countries, put a real number behind it. Forty-one percent of respondents say their organization has cut a layer of management in the past twelve months. That's not a forecast or a warning about where things are headed — it's a description of something that has already happened to two out of every five companies represented in the survey.

The Automation of Coordination Work

The logic behind it is straightforward enough once you say it out loud. A large part of what middle managers have historically done — relaying status updates, coordinating handoffs between teams, translating strategic direction into daily assignments, compiling the reports that justify the next round of decisions — is coordination work. And coordination work is exactly the category of labor that AI systems have gotten quietly, remarkably good at automating over the past two years. When the coordinating gets automated, the case for the layer built to do the coordinating gets harder to defend in a budget meeting.

The Second-Order Strain on Remaining Leaders

What Korn Ferry's data captures next is the part companies tend not to advertise. Seventy-two percent of senior executives report feeling stretched thin, having absorbed the coaching conversations, the context-setting, and the day-to-day feedback that used to belong to the managers who got cut, on top of their own already-full workload. Thirty-seven percent of employees say losing that middle layer has left them feeling directionless. Forty-three percent report that alignment across leadership has actually gotten worse since the flattening began, not better — a genuinely inconvenient finding for anyone hoping this would be a clean efficiency story. Gartner had actually flagged this trajectory back in October 2024, projecting that a fifth of organizations would use AI to flatten their structures by 2026, eliminating more than half of existing middle-management roles in the process. Two years on, the forecast reads less like speculation and more like an early draft of the current headlines: Amazon's cut of 14,000 corporate roles last October was explicitly framed around removing organizational layers, and Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince has been unusually blunt about his own restructuring, describing it as keeping the people he calls "builders" and letting go of the ones he calls "measurers."

The Broken Leadership Pipeline

The finding worth sitting with longest, though, isn't the 41% headline — it's what Korn Ferry's own analysts flag as the second-order cost. Organizations cutting today's middle-management layer are, in the same motion, removing the rung of the ladder that people climb to become tomorrow's senior leaders. That's not an abstract concern. It's a pipeline problem with a multi-year lag, which means the companies celebrating a leaner org chart this quarter may not fully understand the bill coming due in three or four years, when the senior leadership bench turns out to be thinner than anyone planned for, because the layer that used to grow those leaders simply isn't there anymore. Flattening an organization is easy to do quickly. Rebuilding a leadership pipeline, if the flattening goes too far, is not.