Unbundle the Manager
AI is right about half of a manager's job. The companies deleting the whole role are financing this year's margin with their 2028 bench.
Three of the most-watched founders in business have reached the same verdict within weeks of each other, and it is unusually blunt. Jack Dorsey, in a manifesto co-written with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, declares that “there is no need for a permanent middle management layer.” Airbnb’s Brian Chesky doesn’t think “people managers will have any value in the future”, meaning people who only manage people. Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, cutting roughly 14% of his company, tells staff there will be “no more pure managers” and flattens the org to five layers below the chief executive. Amazon has raised its ratio of workers to managers and opened a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” to hunt the layer down by request. The consensus is hardening into orthodoxy: the manager is over, and AI swung the axe.
But now read the part between the lines. Dorsey does not abolish the human work of management; he keeps a role he calls the “player-coach,” whose explicit job is to “combine building with developing people” and “invest in the growth of the people around them.” Armstrong reaches for the identical phrase — managers as “player-coaches, getting their hands dirty.” Chesky’s named survivor is Jony Ive, a leader whose authority came from craft, not from a box on a chart. The most aggressive flatteners on earth are not deleting the manager. They are unbundling the role: automating one half of it and keeping the other.
Focus On: The Two Jobs Riding in One Seat
A manager has always carried two loads that happen to share a job title. The first is routing: cascade strategy downward, filter reality upward, summarise, reconcile, chase status, translate between the layer above and the layer below. This is information plumbing, and it is exactly what a system fed by machine-readable work can now do continuously. Even the sceptics concede it. The organisational consultant Erica Seldin, quoted in the Bloomberg piece that prompted this issue, says of the cascade function: “That component of their work is going away — I’m sold on that.”
The second load is developing people. Judgement under ambiguity, the call the model shouldn’t make alone, accountability for a number that goes to a regulator, the trust a team leans on when the quarter turns ugly, and the slow manufacture of the people who will run the place in five years. Dorsey himself files this under “the edge”: “intuition, opinionated direction, cultural context, trust dynamics, the feeling in a room.” No world model touches that. It is the residue left once the plumbing is automated away.
I’ve written here before, in “Automate or Augment,” about how to audit your own role against this machine — which of your weekly tasks a model could finish without you, and where to move before it matters. This is the other half of that conversation, one level up. There the question was personal: does my job survive? Here it is structural. What becomes of an entire stratum of the company, and of the company that depends on it, when one of the manager’s two jobs is automated and the other is not? Get that wrong and you do not lose a task. You lose the apparatus that grows your leaders.
The Span Trap
The clearest place to watch the two jobs come apart is the number of people reporting to one boss. Gartner finds the average span of control has widened roughly 2.8-fold since 2017, with three-quarters of HR chiefs reporting their managers overwhelmed; the same Bloomberg report puts the rise from about five direct reports to more than sixteen. The logic behind the widening sounds impeccable. If AI handles coordination, a manager can hold far more people, so give them more.
AI lifts the routing span toward infinity; a system does not tire at the seventeenth report. The development span does not move at all, because it was never about information. It was about attention. Melanie Naranjo, chief people officer at Ethena, puts it without ceremony: “When you have one manager who’s managing 17 people, there’s no way you can convince me that they have a good relationship with every single person.” The development span is the span of the Renaissance bottega — a master takes a handful of apprentices and grows them at the same bench, never seventeen at arm’s length. Widen the span and the manager is not more efficient, only emptier: the half of the job that needed attention gone, the title that implied it retained.
The strain shows in the people still holding those spans. Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace records manager engagement falling from 31% to 22% in three years, the steepest drop of any group and the main engine of a global decline it prices at roughly 9% of world output. A survey by the mental-health provider Modern Health found two in five managers had received a new mental-health diagnosis in the past year, three times the rate of the people they manage, and that more than half had cried over work stress in the previous month. This is what a half-deleted job feels like from the inside, before anyone is formally let go.
The Invoice Arrives in 2028
Here is the turn, and it reverses the way most boards score the decision. Flattening books an immediate, legible saving: fewer salaries, a tidier chart. The cost is real but deferred, which is precisely why the saving looks free. The middle is, in one workplace consultant’s phrase from the Bloomberg piece, “the training ground for the challenges of senior leadership” — the layer where people learn to lead by leading, under supervision, before the stakes turn existential. Cut it and development does not slow. It stops.
The lag runs about two years, and the market has begun to name it. Fortune ran a headline in April that could have closed one of these issues: “the middle manager cuts saving you millions today will cost you everything in 2028.” When a senior seat opens and no internal candidate is ready, you hire externally at a premium and absorb the cost of the rushed promotions you make to fill the gap. McKinsey, in Power to the Middle, prices the asset being scrapped: companies that genuinely tap their middle managers deliver something close to three times the shareholder return, and “the very management layer that has been so severely beaten down is now absolutely vital to achieving organisational success — and most senior leaders still don’t realise that.”
The supply side is collapsing to meet the demand side. Robert Walters’ work on what it calls “conscious unbossing” finds a majority of Gen Z professionals reject middle management outright, most preferring an individual track, most calling the job high stress for low reward. They watched the layer deleted for efficiency and drew the obvious conclusion about where the ladder now leads. So the flattening is a financing trick rather than the efficiency it appears to be: a margin uplift this year, set against a leadership-replacement bill and a culture bill that fall due in 2028 — a trade no board would knowingly make in cash.
It Comes for Marketing First
This is not someone else’s problem in HR. It reaches marketing first, the most coordination-heavy function in most companies and so the one with the most routing to automate. Harvard Business Review’s redesign of the marketing organisation for the agentic age and McKinsey’s work on agentic marketing workflows describe the same migration: from channel teams thick with coordination toward workflow pods where agents own the reporting and the synthesis. That is the routing layer, lifted out wholesale. The CMO’s own role, in HBR’s framing, narrows and deepens; the operational relay passes to the agents, while positioning, narrative, and the judgement no agent can make stay human.
The practical move is: for every management role you are about to cut or absorb, split it on paper into routing and developing. Automate the routing without mercy — it is plumbing, and the machine does it better. Then look hard at the developing and ask the only question that counts: if this seat disappears, who grows our 2028 leaders?
Set two spans, not one. Let the routing span run toward infinity, carried by the system. Keep the development span deliberately narrow, eight people rather than seventeen, and staff it with fewer, better-paid humans whose job is judgement and people, not status meetings. That is not nostalgia for the old org chart; it is the unbundling the manifestos perform and the press releases hide.
The brave move is to keep a thin layer of people whose only job is to grow the leaders you will need in 2028, and to pay them as though you believe it. You will need them.
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