Imagine a bustling beehive. The queen stays tucked away, doing her thing. The worker bees buzz on the outside, gathering pollen, building hexagons. But who organizes the chaos? Who makes sure there’s order in the buzz?
Middle bees.
Strip them out, and the hive doesn’t just slow down—it collapses.
That’s essentially what’s happening in many companies today.
Over the past few years, organizations—especially post-pandemic—have tried to “flatten” their org charts in the name of efficiency, speed, and budget cuts. Middle managers? Often the first to go. But here’s the twist: cutting the middle isn’t saving culture—it’s hollowing it out.
🚫 Middle Management: More Than Middlemen
When companies remove middle managers, they’re not just removing a layer of oversight. They’re removing mentorship, communication flow, conflict resolution, and institutional memory.
Tracy Lawrence’s Forbes piece nailed it: middle managers are the emotional infrastructure of a company. They humanize the top-down decisions, translate strategy into daily rhythm, and catch signals from below before they become seismic.
A Harvard Business Review study backs this up. It found that middle managers are often the biggest drivers of employee engagement. They don’t just manage people—they lead them through ambiguity, stress, and constant change.
Remove that—and who’s left to carry the emotional labor?
📉 The Burnout Boomerang
Let’s talk burnout.
Burnout isn’t just hitting frontline workers or execs—it’s throttling the “survivors” of these org changes. In the absence of middle managers, senior leaders are asked to go deeper into the trenches, while individual contributors are expected to climb higher into strategic roles. Both get stretched thin. Both lose morale.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report (2023), employee engagement dropped significantly in companies undergoing “structural flattening.” And burnout? It rose.
Why? Because no one’s job got easier—just blurrier.
🛠️ What We Lose When We “Lean Out”
- Culture Carriers Disappear: Middle managers are the embodiment of a company’s values in action. They enforce culture, not just compliance.
- Succession Gets Sloppy: A Deloitte report on leadership pipelines reveals a 68% drop in internal promotion readiness when companies reduce middle management. Without people in between, who’s developing tomorrow’s leaders?
- Communication Collapses: Flat structures often mean senior leaders are “accessible,” but not always responsive. Middle managers create the connective tissue that keeps feedback loops alive and information flowing.
💡 So What’s the Fix?
No one’s arguing for bloated bureaucracy or unnecessary titles. But smart orgs are realizing that middle management isn’t dead—it just needs a rebrand.
The new middle manager isn’t a gatekeeper—they’re a coach, translator, mentor, and human buffer. They enable resilience, not just reporting.
Companies like Atlassian and HubSpot have re-invested in “People Managers” as strategic assets—not budget lines. They offer leadership development, clear swim lanes, and psychological safety.
As McKinsey points out, the future of work—especially hybrid—needs middle managers to be culture connectors, not just productivity trackers.