In recent years, the middle management debate has catapulted in an entirely new direction. As The Economist wrote recently, and Business Insider highlighted in 2024, big multinational corporations such as Meta and Microsoft are choosing to cut out this “layer” entirely.
In 2025, Google reduced by a third managers responsible for overseeing small teams. Amazon started the new year by confirming that 16 000 jobs were on the line, many of them likely to come from middle management. This was in line with Gartner’s expectations that 20% of businesses would leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to flatten out their reporting structures to reduce overheads.
These shifts have been greeted with disbelief and concern, with particular emphasis by the likes of Korn Ferry Consulting on the negative impacts for strategic direction and the leadership pipeline, as well as talent attrition and less effective communication.
This latest onslaught is hardly new territory for middle managers, who have long occupied an awkward position in organisational life as both transitional rung to senior management and scapegoat for poor engagement and execution.
The argument ‘against’
One of the perennial frustrations of middle managers is that they spend the majority of their time on administrative or low-value tasks, rather than on developing people and enabling performance. They are accused of lacking ambition if they don’t move up the ranks, but often find themselves underutilised and increasingly viewed as dispensable. After all, flatter, technology-driven structures will simply enable information to flow directly from the frontline to the executive suite, won’t it?
The case ‘for’
Yet, as strategic management Professor Brian Leavy highlighted in a far-reaching interview with McKinsey partners Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Field, middle managers thrive when they can play to their strengths: managing talent, coaching performance, sensemaking. More recently, McKinsey argued that removing or hollowing out the middle weakens an organisation’s capacity to integrate people and work at scale. Since middle managers are “in the middle of the action”, they are essential for holding the organisation together under pressure.
Reinvention stalled
More than two decades ago, in the Fall 2005 issue of Leader to Leader journal, management expert Lisa Haneberg argued for a new paradigm. An organisational overhaul that would position middle managers to actively create and represent the organisation every day. Her concept of reinvention was not cosmetic. It required redefining the role, clarifying expectations, reconnecting middle and senior leadership, and deliberately removing unnecessary friction from the work environment.
With new technologies and global unpredictability upending organisational certainty, the middle manager role is again in the spotlight. While mega corporations are looking to reinvention as a cost-cutting exercise, others see it as a case for the value of human leadership in the middle.
Certainly, technology can accelerate information flows, but it cannot replace judgement, trust‑building, or the nuanced interpretation of organisational signals. When self-service systems and automation push more administrative burden downward, middle managers become overloaded and disengaged. When technology is used to liberate them from low-value work, their strategic contribution against becomes visible.
Yet, as Harvard Business Review wrote in 2025, for employees these middle managers remain a vital “moral compass” and valued human link.
Strategic reframing in motion
At GIBS, we agree with Schaninger, Hancock and Field, who argued in 2023 that organisations should stop treating middle management as a way station and instead make it a destination. It is for this reason that we have developed a transdisciplinary programme portfolio to help middle managers create more value by staying close to operations, customers, and teams than by moving into narrower, more distant roles.
Organisations that reward only vertical progression inadvertently drain capability from their own core.
Reframing middle management as a strategic role also changes how performance is evaluated. If middle managers are measured primarily on compliance, reporting, or short-term output, they will optimise for those metrics. If they are recognised for building capability, enabling collaboration, and sustaining engagement during change, then different behaviours emerge. Haneberg’s insistence on role clarity is critical here: ambiguity invites overload, while clarity enables focus on what truly matters for execution and innovation.
The implications for senior leaders are uncomfortable but unavoidable. You cannot simultaneously proclaim the importance of people leadership and design systems that deprive middle managers of the time and authority to lead. Nor can you expect strategy to be implemented effectively while treating those responsible for implementation as expendable. As Leavy’s interview suggests, organisations that continue to undervalue middle management risk burnout, disengagement, and a widening gap between strategic aspiration and operational reality.
At a moment when organisations face persistent uncertainty, the middle is not where ambition goes to die. It is where strategy becomes real, where culture is enacted daily, and where technology either amplifies or undermines human capability. At GIBS, we firmly believe that reinventing middle management is not an act of nostalgia. It is a strategic necessity.
