It's a really bad time to be a middle manager
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Over the past two years, American businesses have been engaged in a rapid-fire restructuring of their corporate hierarchies. In the name of "flattening," they've been waging war on middle managers — trimming an entire tier of supervisory jobs that Mark Zuckerberg derided as nothing more than "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." Following Meta's lead, Citi reduced its 13 layers of management to eight. UPS axed 12,000 of its 85,000 managers. And in September, Amazon announced plans to increase its ratio of workers to supervisors by at least 15%. "I hate bureaucracy," CEO Andy Jassy declared, echoing the zeal for "efficiency" that Elon Musk, one of the pioneers of the current corporate flattening, is now seeking to unleash on the halls of government.
But here's the thing: It's not just that tens of thousands of middle managers have lost their jobs. It's that the jobs themselves have been eliminated — and they may not be coming back.
To test that theory, I asked Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics provider, to crunch the numbers for me, using its database of job postings aggregated from across the internet. It divided employees into two buckets of managers (senior leadership and middle management) and two buckets of lower-level employees (experienced associates and junior workers). Then it looked at how many job openings employers are posting today, compared with the hiring heyday of 2022.
What the data reveals is stark. Earlier this year, when white-collar hiring was at its lowest point, openings for junior roles — entry-level positions requiring little to no prior experience — were down by 14%. But hiring had plunged by 43% for middle managers and 57% for senior leaders. If you had any sort of management experience, your job prospects were bleak.
Since then, though, we've seen a significant rebound in job postings for almost everyone — except middle managers. In October, employers were still advertising 42% fewer middle-management positions than they did in April 2022. Which means that those who lost their jobs in the Great Flattening are now facing a whole new horror: There aren't any positions left for them to take.
The assault on middle managers dates back to the 1980s, when globalization gave rise to a new philosophy of management that prioritized cost cutting over everything else. Supervisors — earning big salaries for rubber-stamping the work of their subordinates — became an easy target. Trim the fat, the thinking went, and the efficiencies will follow. From 1986 to 1998, one study found, the number of managers reporting to division heads dropped by 25%. At the same time, the number of managers reporting directly to a CEO nearly doubled.
Executives got the flattening that they wanted. But it's unclear whether getting rid of middle managers actually made companies run more efficiently. As I wrote last year, one study found that businesses with fewer layers of management were able to deliver their products faster. But study after study found that when middle managers do their jobs right, they bolster performance more than either top executives or ground-level employees. Supervisors do real work. They motivate. They mentor. They communicate critical information to and from different parts of the company. They smooth out glitches and spot opportunities. They're the ones who keep the trains running.
But now is an especially bad time to be an experienced supervisor. According to an analysis by Live Data Technologies, another workforce analytics provider, middle managers made up 32% of layoffs last year, compared with 20% in 2019. And as the data from Revelio Labs shows, companies appear to have no intention of refilling those supervisory roles, even as they resume hiring for lower-level jobs. That has created a double whammy for middle managers: There's a sharp spike in job seekers, and they're competing for an increasingly small universe of open roles.
Over the past year I've heard from hundreds of managers mired in this double whammy. What's struck me is how eerily similar their stories are. They all come across as smart and articulate. They're all in their late 40s to 50s. When they got laid off from their supervisory jobs, they didn't expect their job search to be too difficult. After all, they'd spent decades honing their skills and climbing the corporate ladder, often at leading companies. Surely, all that experience had to count for something. But despite sending out hundreds of applications, they can't get anyone to return their calls. They're utterly baffled, and they all have the same question: What is going on here?
It's only after seeing the data that I finally understand what's going on: There just aren't enough supervisory jobs to go around.
It's the question I've been asking, too — combing through government data, talking to employers and economists, studying applicant-tracking systems. Because so many of the frustrated job seekers are older, I thought maybe we were seeing some new form of age discrimination: Call it the Curse of the Gen X Professional. But it's only after seeing the data from Revelio Labs that I finally understand what's going on: There just aren't enough supervisory jobs to go around anymore.
In response, many displaced managers have swallowed their pride and started applying to jobs lower on the corporate food chain. As Revelio Labs' data shows, nonmanagerial jobs are faring much better these days — and you'd think companies would be thrilled to get the experience and know-how of seasoned professionals on the cheap. But take the example of a former middle manager I'll call Rick, who is 54. After getting rejected for all the supervisory jobs he could find, he widened his search to include entry-level positions — only to be rejected for being overqualified.
At this point, all Rick wants is a chance to prove himself. "Forget the titles, forget all that other stuff," he told me. "I just need a job. My unemployment runs out in about 30 days. I'll come in and do a great job for you."
This is the paradox that lies at the heart of the Great Flattening: The very experience that should be a selling point for senior leaders has become a liability. Some have tried deleting former jobs from their resumes, to hide their supervisory experience. Others, like Rick, omit the year they graduated from college. One former chief operating officer, whose search has gone so poorly that she's now applying to be an executive assistant, told me she addresses her overqualified-ness in her cover letters. "I understand that my résumé has some big titles on it, but let me tell you who I am at heart," she writes. "I really want to be doing this, and I'm not wedded to the title."
What all the out-of-work managers want to know is: When is the hiring freeze for supervisors going to thaw? That depends, in large part, on whether companies come to view the flattening as a success. Many CEOs insist they aren't getting rid of middle managers just to save money. They think having fewer layers of management will, as Zuckerberg put it, create a "stronger" company that can build "higher-quality products faster." That hints at a dark prospect for managers like Rick: The rung of the corporate ladder they spent their careers reaching could be gone for good.
There's a chance, of course, that the current craze for corporate flattening could ease over time. Companies are already discovering that having few middle managers is placing an enormous strain on their operations. The supervisors who survived the purge have been forced to take on much larger teams, and they're burned out to a crisp. Gen Zers, deprived of their mentors, are increasingly disengaged. Departments are more siloed than ever, with no one to do the tedious and thankless and essential work of coordinating across different teams. The best hope for managers like Rick is that CEOs are getting a real-time refresher in the value of managers.
"I'm not at that point in my life where I'm ready to take that step back," Rick told me. "I just want to work with good people and enjoy what I'm doing. I could go to Domino's and start delivering pizza. But I know I can do a lot more than that."
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.