Let's talk about what's quietly happened to a huge number of managers over the last couple of years and what to do if this happened or is happening to you. Here's a typical scenario. You used to manage, let's say five, six people. Then there was a round of cuts or a reorg or a hiring freeze that never stopped, and the layer of management above you or beside you got eliminated. And now you're managing not five or six, but you're managing 12.
You have the same number of hours in a day, but now you're managing double the team. And this, by the way, doesn't always have to be the direct reports. Sometimes these can be dotted lines. Sometimes you realize, yeah, they were assigned to a different manager who's like the VP and has no time for them at all, so I'm actually unofficially becoming their coach because their manager is absent or overloaded with other work.
And so de facto, you not only have your direct team as on the org chart, but now suddenly you're also pulled into different directions to support people that are not actually in part of your reporting structure. And this is what people are calling the Great Flattening.
Companies have spent the last few years stripping out middle management, usually pointing at AI and efficiency as the reason. The manager headcount at public companies dropped measurably between 2022 and 2025, so this isn't anecdotal, just to be clear. Amazon alone cut something like 14,000 management roles, and the people left standing, you know, at Amazon didn't get a lighter load to go with it, right?
The company's still doing the same amount of work. They, in fact, inherited everyone else's load. The managers that are gone, then, the responsibilities and the role and the support has to go elsewhere. And there's hard data on what this is doing to people in the middle. Specifically,
Gallup just put out its latest global workplace report, and the picture is pretty clear. Worldwide employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025. This is the lowest it's been since the pandemic and the first time that Gallup has ever recorded two straight years of decline. But the more important story is what's actually happening to managers specifically.
The manager engagement dropped from 27%
to 22% in a single year, and it's down nine points since 2022. So managers used to have what Gallup calls an engagement premium, where they were noticeably more engaged than the people that they led, but that premium has basically vanished. Manager wellbeing and burnout are now among the worst of any group in the workplace in essence, the people holding the whole thing together, right, the managers in those roles, are quietly cracking.
Like, there's a problem. There's, like, a crack in the wall, and we're looking at it but not really doing anything. And just to make the point here even more clear, in a separate study, Gallup also found that manager engagement drops as spans of control get wider, which is the exact squeeze we're describing, right?
You have more people, more span of control, yet less support and thinner margins to go in. So if you're feeling that, know that you're not imagining it and that you're not alone. And real game, and I hope that you hear this part clearly, it's n- this is not a temporary squeeze that you can just wait out until things go back to normal because, I don't know, markets will recover, hiring will, uh, start to pick up again.
Things will change. No, the actual job, the actual organizational structure has changed, and you cannot manage 12 people the way that you managed six. So if you try to run a team of 12 with the same hands-on and every detail kind of style that worked at six, two things will happen. What ultimately will happen that you'll burn out, and it doesn't need to be the clinical burnout, but it means the, like, burnout where you're just not effectively driving vision and a future and a strategic direction because you feel so depleted.
And the people on your team will notice that. They will start to feel somewhat directionless and disconnected to the vision or a purpose. There's, uh, survey data showing that after these types of flattenings we've just talked about, a large share of employees say they feel that lack of direction. And a large share of senior leaders also admit that they're drowning in the operational detail that used to be handled by the layer below them. And so that's the trap, right? On both ends, we're burning the candles from both sides.
And what I wanna talk about here is how not to fall into this, how not to be part of this squeeze, where the only two option is to either quit or to burn out.
There is another path, and if you wanna know what it is, stick with me for the next 15 minutes. Because the numbers around engagement and all of that, that, that's the easy part, and they're also not really the point. The point is what you can actually do about it, and that part is what's generally in your control.
So by the end of this video, you'll know the one mindset shift that makes a bigger team survivable instead of crushing, and a handful of concrete moves that you can put into place this week. Plus, the single thing most stretched managers quietly drop that actually ends up costing them their best people.
So if you get this right, and you stop sort of the white-knuckling a team that got too big, and instead you start leading it in a way that's sustainable for you, and a lot clearer for them, for your team, then that is a win-win. So let's start here.
First, why getting good at this early matters, and it matters a lot right now. Beyond just surviving your own week, there's a bigger, more strategic reason to get good at this quickly. This is a survival skill of this whole era. When companies flatten, the managers who keep their jobs are the ones who can actually hold a wide span without the whole thing falling apart
While initially a whole lot of managers were laid off, again because of orgs or AI, at least what I believe will happen in the future is that companies will strategically look to and retain managers that can hold a wide span of responsibilities without the whole thing falling apart. And the ones who can't, the ones who need a small team to function are the ones who will start to look expensive and ultimately replaceable.
And so it's not only about keeping your job, it's about where you're headed in your career. . Many senior leaders right now are stretched thin, and many of them are also a little nervous. And what they're desperate for is someone they can hand a big, complicated group to and trust that it'll run without constant hand-holding.
That's key, not just for their own sanity, but also for their ultimate success. So when you're seen as the person who could navigate this, you don't just survive the flattening, but you actually become more valuable because of it. So that wider span of responsibilities that you- that's breaking other managers can be the exact thing that gets you promoted if you learn to run it well.
So your leadership then actually becomes scalable, and it doesn't just grow incrementally, you know, a couple people every year. No, you can quickly scale from, you know, the six to the 12 to the 20 to the 50 to the 100s.
And what I hope the encouraging part here to be is that, what actually decides your success in this is not the team size, not necessarily the organization, but your skill and what specifically, and specifically how you, and specifically how you spend your hours.
Your, uh, and, and specifically how you spend your hours. Two managers with 12 reports each can get completely different results based on what they choose to do with their time. And so factually we know if one can do it, then why wouldn't the other, the other one be able to do it? That is then a learnable skill, and the people who learn it early pull away, from everyone else, choose to underscore that one more time. The trap, but of course there's always one when this stuff is not easy, Most brand managers got promoted because they were good and hands-on and reliable. You were the person who knew every detail, caught every problem, could jump into any task, right? And that reliability, that expertise
That instinct is what made you successful and build a reputation. And when your team doubles, the same instinct will tell you to just work harder. Stay later, sit in more meetings, remo- re- review more things, be the hero at twice the scale. And I wanna give you here a real example 'cause this is so common, and I see this with the managers I work with all the time.
So one specific managers went from, uh, six reports to 13 after her company cut an entire layer in the org. And her instinct here was to protect her team by absorbing sort of almost the whole hit by herself. She just wanted everyone to sort of kind of smoothly ride out this or- reorg and this transition, and she took it on herself to, um, to be the buffer.
So she kept every weekly one-on-one that the employees had. She kept reviewing everything personally. She kept her open door policy and ultimately just stretched her own day to make the, you know, the, the math of the hours and minutes work.
And she did that for about three months. And, um, on the outside, it looked pretty heroic. And of course, her team loved her and thought she handled it really well. But then it started to look like exhaustion. 12-hour days. Her best people were frustrated because they were stuck waiting on her for approval.
She became a bottleneck. Uh, the newer folks on the team started to kind of drift away, not fully be engaged. They felt like accountability was missing because the manager wasn't able to check in as often. She wasn't able to really coach and support them.
And this may start to look like she's failing at managing the 13 people, but she did exactly what helped her succeed at managing the smaller team now with the bigger team. And so how would this not lead to success? That was hard to, like, conceptualize.
Maybe intellectually she kinda got it, but in the day-to-day work, she would retrieve back, especially in stressful situations, to those success strategies that she's developed as she was successfully running that team, the smaller team. But with the larger team, this all just doesn't work. The, the math isn't mathing, as kids would say.
If we break this down, if you are spending two hours a week per person on a team of six, you do not have two hours a week per person on a team of 12. You have one at best. So if your way of managing depends on you personally touching everything, that model will break between, you know, jumping from the six to the 12.
And no amount of effort puts it back together. So this concept of, like, the harder I work, the more successful I will be, and the harder I work, And any challenge can just be overcome by working harder, that no longer works. The only thing that works with that model is it gets you to a burnout faster.
So the shift you have to make is from being the person who does and checks the work to being the person who designs the system that gets the work done well without you standing in the middle of it. Like, you're no longer the manager in the middle of it, all of it, and all the arrows flowing back to you.
You have to be the one who's creating the system, and you're able to remove yourself from that center stage. Now I wanna make one more quick point here before we get practical. When a layer gets cut, your team feels that too, right? They watch their colleagues leave and many of them start to wonder if they are going to be next.
So part of leading a flattened team is naming that, right? Being, being open and transparent instead of pretending the reorg never happened. Now, you don't need to know all the answers or know all the reasons for why the reorg happened.
Something as simple as, "Hey, I know the last few months have been unsettling, and I won't pretend otherwise. Now, here's what I can tell you. Here's what we're going to do, and here are a few things that I don't know yet." This addressing both what you do know and what's clear, what you don't know and it's not clear yet, that's a really important point to make, to call out both sides. And when you do, you get so much more trust from your team than when you act like nothing changed or nothing is a big deal
Now with that said, let's talk about what actually leading into the future in that flattened situation looks like.
First is build an operating cadence instead of managing sort of by interruption. When you had six people, you could afford to be reactive.
Handle things as they popped up. Keep an open door all day. Uh, you know, answer all the quick questions that came your way. But at 12 people, the constant interruption, the constant calls, quick questions, and things will, like, eat your life. So you replaced it with a rhythm, a predictable weekly team meeting where the recurring stuff gets handled in one place with everyone present.
You have one-on-ones on a set schedule, and ideally they don't move. You don't need to have the same amount of time with every single person, so you can have certain one-on-ones be 30 minutes, other one-on-ones be 60 minutes. The idea that all on a, all one-on-ones with everyone on your team need to be at the same cadence and the same length is a myth.
That's not true. Every person on your team needs to be led differently, and they need different levels of attention from you. So really adjust to what's actually needed and effective. Then have a clear written home
And, and then along with the system, have really clear rules or guidelines for, uh, sharing the status and your availability so that people aren't pinging you all day for updates and then getting frustrated when you're not available. This is probably the biggest issue. It's not that o- it's, it's often not that managers are, you know, absent, or it's often not that managers are late with responding to emails or that managers are, um, canceling a one-on-one, although not advised, but if they do.
It's also not the issue per se that you might have a t- two, three-hour block that you're just not picking up phone calls or responding to emails every day. That in itself is usually not the issue. Uh, the issue is that you're not communicating clearly why you do this and what the expectations are for the team.
If there's an emergency, here's how to reach me, but generally I will not respond to emails or be available for meetings between 10 o'clock and 1:00, or between 7:00 AM and 10:00 AM, or between 4... After 4:00, whatever that may be. Because I wanna be really effective with my time or because I need to carve out enough focus time in order to get through all the things that need my, uh, my, that need my, that need my focused attention.
Saying something like that removes the ambiguity and the uncertainty because when you make changes, you're not available, you're not responding, you're, um, having stuff in your inbox that you're not addressing and you don't talk to people about how much, uh, time they typically need to give you in order to address things, um, especially when you're in a stressful, uh, week or so.
If you're not calling it out and saying like, "I know, I see the emails come through. I will get to all this by next week, but I need you to have some patience with me this week." If you're not saying that, and people will, in this ambiguous and out of this, in, will in this vacuum of information, will likely make it about themselves.
We all tend to sort of like think about the worst case scenario- scenarios and personalize it. "Oh, it's because they don't think this is important. It's that they don't respect me enough. They don't value this work." All this kind of stuff. Is typically not true. And so effective communication around availability is key, especially when you trans...
especially when you're trying to set up those systems and then with that, if you have that goal that most of your routines run on track and, and are as you've laid them down, then it frees up your attention for the things
that genuinely need you.
So let's talk about a concrete version of that. A team of 12 might run on a weekly team meeting for, let's say, shared updates and blockers. One-on-ones every other week for most people, but kept weekly for anyone new or anyone struggling.
And a written status document everyone updates by the end of day Friday So Monday isn't a scramble of catch-up. The exact shape, the exact shape of that, and that's just the beginning of it.
But those kind of structures, um, that you have to reset and redefine when you step up and your span of control increases is really important. The exact shape of all that actually matters a lot less than the principle, right? You set the rhythm on purpose instead of letting 12 people's random needs set your calendar for you.
Second, lean on written and async, and asynchronous communication far more than you used to. At a wide span, if everything has to happen live in a meeting, in a conversation with you in the room, you-- there's no way out than for you to become the bottleneck for your own team. So get comfortable making decisions and giving direction in writing, and get comfortable letting your team move without waiting for you to bless every step in real time.
Especially with AI note-taking and AI meeting summaries and g- all those things, this is really inevitable and a low-hanging fruit for so many managers to build that into their operating system. Now, the third, and this is probably the biggest one here, is to delegate decisions, not just tasks.
So most managers delegate, you know, tasks, which is just, "Go do this thing," you know, task like, "Hey, can you go do this thing?" But if every decision still routes back to you for approval, you haven't actually reduced your load n-enough, enough to be able to handle that bigger span. You've built a queue, basically, with your name on it.
The real move is to delegate not just tasks, but authority, and to be really explicit about it. So when you tell people exactly where the lines are, such as anything under this size, you decide that you don't need me. Anything in this category, run it, and then tell me afterwards.
And anything that addresses this client or that dollar amount, those are specific things to bring me in before you act. When you set those clear thresholds like that, then your team stops waiting on you for things that you're fully, that they're fully capable of handling, and you, and you then get your hours back for the decisions that truly need your actual judgment.
So I'm gonna give you a quick example here. If someone comes and asks you whether to approve a client refund, under the old model, you'd weigh in every time, like here yes, here no, right? But under this new one, you've already told them refunds under $500 are your call. Just log it so I can see it. Now, now this may sound like, oh, duh, that's not rocket science, obviously, but look at your own team and how often, get really self-critical here, how often do people run decisions by you that you think they should have handled by themselves?
Why they're coming to validate this or to check in with you on that? Um, you think that they are fully capable of making those calls, or it's just such low risk or doesn't have a big negative consequence if they make the wrong decision. Those are all the things to no longer be involved in.
When you then multiply that across a dozen people and the decis- the dozen of different decision types, that's exactly where you start to notice, oh, okay, time's coming back and it- you're f- be feeling more freed up
Okay, we're gonna move on to the fourth out of six tips to manage a significantly bigger team as a result of a flattened management structure. This one is to expand your reach through your most capable people. You don't have a layer of managers under you anymore, most likely, but you can still create a lot of leverage even if people around you aren't managers. What I mean by that is lean on your senior people to mentor the new ones. Oftentimes as managers, there's this idea that you have to be the one who does it all. Like you have to be the one who's mentoring, coaching, doing the onboarding plan, you know, managing the hiring process.
But that's not actually true. There's this idea of you not being center stage, but th- building a network where the peers support each other so that not every question lands on your desk. That isn't abdicating your manager position. It's actually building a team that can hold itself up, which is the only way a wide span survives over time.
So really important. It's a mindset shift that needs to happen first where you don't see yourself as center stage, but you start to see like, oh no, there's so many that peer relationships and peer collaboration and four-eye processes and peer support that can happen that doesn't need to involve you at all.
Fifth one, and this is one not to skip. Protect feedback and development because it is the very first thing that gets dropped when we're stretched, and it's actually the most expensive thing to lose. When we're slammed, coaching people can feel like the thing that we can most definitely safely postpone.
It's just not the time. I'm too stressed. I'm in a rush. It's too urgent. Later. But it actually isn't. Uh, Gallup found that giving each person meaningful feedback at least once a week nearly triples the share of employees who are engaged. That is an enormous return for a small, consistent investment. So even at 12 people, your one-on-ones don't get canceled, right?
They get sharper. You wanna stop wasting them on status updates, which again, you can do in writing, and you spend that one-on-one time on the things that only you can give in a conversation, and that is feedback and development. It includes both recognition, appreciation, and also constructive suggestions to improve their performance.
Okay, now on to the sixth and final tip here. Understand that when you can't be everywhere, how you show up in the moments you do have carries far more weight. This is one of those parts where most stretched managers miss that completely. With six people, you had enough contact that the occasional clumsy moment got averaged out.
But with 12 people, every single interaction is a bigger slice of the total face time that anyone gets with you. So the clarity of your communication, the steadiness you hold when you're in a pressured situation the calmness and composure that you hold under pressure, the way that you run the few meetings that you do have that are supposed to be, like, really effective, all of it counts far more now because there's less of you to go around, and therefore each piece carries more of the load, right?
And your presence ultimately becomes a multiplier. When it's strong, a little goes a long way. But when it's weak, the gaps start showing fast because weak interactions, they have this ripple effect and lingering effect where people start to think about it or keep thinking about it for a longer time.
And I guess, again, the fewer of those interactions you have, the more weight each of those interactions carries. Now let me pause here.
Now let me pause here for a second because the last point here is exactly what we work on in the Executive Presence Intensive. This is our eight-week program that we run for senior leaders, and it's built precisely for this situation.
Leaders with more responsibility and less time who can't rely on being in every room anymore and who need the way they show up to carry real weight, both with their teams, their peers, and with their senior stakeholders and leaders
In the program, you will strengthen your communication skills, especially when under pressure or when unprepared. You're learning how to hold steady and grounded when everything around you starts to feel uncertain and how to project certainty.
You're gonna strengthen your ability to lead a larger group
through actual influence because your messages land more effectively. If you're running a stretched team right now and you can feel that the way that you show up now carries more weight than it used to, then this is for you.
The link to learn more is in the show notes.
Okay, so back to it. Here's the bottom line. One last practical piece here, because we tend to forget this. At a wider span, you also have to manage what lands on the team in the first place. When you had six people and someone handed you extra scope, right?
Something that was n- not really part of your team, but we could often absorb it. At 12, every yes that you say upwards gets divided across a team that's already pretty full, including yourself. So part of leading well now is being willing to go back up and say, "Hey, we can take this on, but here's what comes off the list of priorities to make room for this new thing.
Or here's the timeline that's realistic at our current size." That isn't pushing back and not being a team player for its own sake. It is about protecting the team's ability to actually deliver. To actually deliver and not burn out themselves. To actually deliver, which is now a core part of your job.
Which, which is a core part of your job. So this whole flattening of the middle management layer isn't a storm to wait out. I think this is the key message here. It, it is a new shape of, it is a new shape of the job, and the managers who adapt to it and learn how to lead bigger teams and don't just hang on to their old su- success strategies that allowed them to be successful managers with a smaller team.
Those are the ones that will get ahead, because the skill of running a wide span well is rare, and senior leaders are looking for it. So let's stop trying to be the hero who touches everything,
even if that sounds compelling, and instead start being the architect who builds a team that runs well without you in the middle of it. Set the cadence, delegate the decisions, protect the feedback and development conversations, and make every moment you do have count for more. The manager who needed a small team to be good just became fragile. The one who can lead a bigger team well becomes indispensable. And by the way, it's not that this is all new. Any leader who's moved up and has scaled their leadership from like a, a team of 5 to 20 to 50 to hundreds, right?
As I said earlier, every single manager has to go through a complete rewriting of their operating system, their leadership system, because the things that work with a small team do not work with a bigger team, including how you manage your time, how you communicate, how often you meet, how you delegate, how you make decisions, and all of that.
And this is the moment to start building these skills even if you're still managing a small team. Like pay attention to how you will prepare for leading a bigger team. If you're able to create extra buffer, uh, on top of managing your small team, you can spend that extra time at either, you know, learning AI or leaning into strategic initiatives,
but you're also demonstrating to other senior leaders, "Hey, I got us. I got this team, and I can actually do more." And that again, is what is the value add in a time where the middle layer is shrinking and is having a hard time, which is what we can see in those engagement numbers.
Okay, that's it for today. I'll be back next week with another episode of the Manager Track Podcast. See you then.
If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out at archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my bestselling book, The Confident and Competent New Manager, How to Quickly Rise to Success in Your First Leadership Role.
Check it out at archova.org/books, or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there