The great flattening: what fewer middle managers means for who has the ball
Since 2023, a number of large companies have publicly cut layers of middle management. Meta called 2023 its "year of efficiency", Amazon's leadership said in 2024 it wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers, and many others have quietly widened managers' spans of control. Commentators started calling it "the great flattening".
Whatever you think of the strategy, the practical effect on teams is the same: fewer people whose job is to know where everything stands.
What middle managers actually did
Strip away the org chart and a lot of middle management was coordination:
- Knowing who is working on what
- Noticing when work is stuck
- Chasing people across teams
- Translating priorities from above into actions below
When those roles disappear, that work does not vanish. It either moves to the remaining managers, who now have twice as many reports, or it moves to individual contributors. Or it does not happen at all, and work stalls in handoffs nobody is watching.
Wider spans make visibility harder
A manager with six reports can keep the state of everyone's work in their head. A manager with fifteen cannot. Gallup's research on managers, including its State of the Global Workplace reports, has repeatedly found manager engagement under pressure, and wider spans are one reason.
The response cannot be more status meetings. There is no time for them.
Ownership has to be explicit
In a flatter team, every piece of work needs a visible answer to: who has the ball? Not "the marketing team", but a person. That makes it possible for anyone, not just a manager, to see where something is stuck and who to ask. See clear ownership without status meetings.
Waiting has to be visible
The most dangerous state in a flat organisation is "waiting on someone". With fewer coordinators, nobody notices that a request has been sitting with another team for two weeks. Tools that show how long each item has been waiting, and on whom, replace some of what managers used to do by instinct. See the waiting-on-someone problem.
Individual contributors need their own system
When nobody else is tracking your handoffs, you have to. A personal board showing what you owe, what you are waiting on and what is next is less a productivity hack than a survival tool in a flat organisation.
What this means for small teams
Small teams have always been flat. The lessons from large companies' flattening are lessons small teams already know: make ownership explicit, make waiting visible and keep coordination lightweight. The difference is that larger organisations are now learning them under pressure.
How Axtio fits
Axtio is built around exactly these two questions: who has the ball on each action, and how long has it been waiting? Projects are rows, columns are Mine, Other, Next Steps and Done, and anything in Other for a week gets flagged. It works for one person or a team, with no manager required to keep it current. See team accountability without micromanagement.