For years, companies have treated flatter structures as a sign of progress. Fewer layers. Faster decisions. Less bureaucracy. Lower costs. On paper, that sounds sensible. In the real world, it often creates a quieter problem. Work gets pushed onto fewer managers, the number of direct reports climbs, and the people who are supposed to coach, correct, and coordinate the system lose the time to do it well.
That is no longer a theory. Gallup’s recent work on span of control found that the average number of people reporting to managers rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, nearly 50% above the level Gallup measured in 2013. At the same time, Gallup’s 2026 workplace data showed manager engagement dropping sharply, and its separate leadership research found that leaders often report stronger overall life evaluations while also experiencing greater day-to-day emotional strain. That combination should get the attention of any executive team. It means the manager layer can still look functional from a distance while getting weaker at the exact work only managers can do.
The deeper issue is accountability. In March, Gallup reported that creating accountability is leadership’s weakest core competency. Around the same time, business coverage kept circling back to the same structural question: how much can a company flatten before it starts to erode the daily disciplines that make execution possible? JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon argued in his latest shareholder letter that the best teams should be small, authorized, and able to move fast. That matters because a company can remove layers without creating clarity. In fact, many firms are doing the opposite. They are cutting managers, widening spans of control, and then wondering why standards drift, coaching gets thinner, and performance reviews feel late, vague, or political.
This is not a case for adding hierarchy for its own sake. It is a case for treating organizational structure as a management tool rather than a fashion choice. Middle managers and senior leaders need to ask a simple question: when the structure gets leaner, who is still doing the hard work of setting expectations, following up, correcting course, and keeping teams aligned? If the answer is “everyone,” the answer is usually no one.
The appeal of flattening is easy to understand
There are good reasons companies flatten. Layers can slow decisions, bury accountability, and turn routine approvals into a long hallway of meetings. In some firms, too many managers supervise too little work. Gallup’s own span-of-control research notes that many organizations still have managers overseeing fewer than five people, which can be wasteful when the work is stable and the team does not need close coordination. No serious manager should defend unnecessary structure.
The problem starts when flattening is treated as a universal cure. A company trims the middle, widens teams, and assumes speed will rise automatically. Sometimes it does, at first. Fewer approvals can remove obvious friction. But that gain can be temporary if the remaining managers inherit too many people, too much player-coach work, and too little room to manage. Gallup reports that 97% of managers now carry some individual-contributor work in addition to leading others, and that they spend a median of 40% of their time on that non-managerial work. Once that load rises alongside bigger teams, the management job changes shape. Coaching shrinks. Follow-up gets delayed. Standards become less consistent across people.
That is why flatter structures should be judged by operating results, not by appearance. A lean chart is not proof of discipline. It may only mean the business moved management work to the background and stopped naming it.
What actually breaks when spans of control get too wide
The first thing to go is usually attention. A manager with six or seven direct reports can still know who needs coaching, who is drifting, who is ready for more responsibility, and where a conflict is starting to form. A manager with twelve, fifteen, or twenty direct reports can still do that in some settings, but only if the work is simple, the team is stable, and the manager is not also carrying a second full-time job as an individual contributor. Once those conditions disappear, the math changes.
Gallup’s January analysis is useful because it does not pretend there is a single magic number. Instead, it shows that larger teams can work only under certain conditions: the manager has the right talent for the role, the team stays engaged, the individual-contributor burden is limited, and employees receive meaningful feedback at least weekly. That last point matters more than many executives realize. Gallup found that employees who strongly agreed they had received meaningful feedback in the past week were highly engaged, regardless of team size. The lesson is clear. A wider span can work, but only if the manager still has time and discipline to manage.
When that time disappears, managers stop doing the work that prevents larger breakdowns. One-on-ones become status checks. Performance problems go unresolved because the conversation feels expensive. Strong employees receive less coaching because they seem safe to leave alone. Weaker employees get attention only after they create a visible problem. Meetings increase because no one is sure who owns what. That is how a flatter structure begins to create the bureaucracy it claimed it would remove.
Accountability weakens long before results collapse
Many leaders believe accountability is in place as long as scorecards exist and targets are set. That is not enough. Accountability depends on follow-through. Someone has to notice the miss, name it, decide what happens next, and stay with the issue until the standard improves or the role changes. In practice, that work usually falls to line managers.
Gallup’s March report on leadership competencies found that fewer than half of leaders rate themselves as outstanding or exceptional at creating accountability, and managers are even more pessimistic about how well their leaders do so. That gap is important. It suggests that leadership teams often believe standards are clearer than they are perceived downstream. In a heavily flattened structure, that gap can widen. Senior executives still see dashboards and deadlines. The employees doing the work see delayed decisions, inconsistent corrections, and managers who are too stretched to stay close to the details.
Once that happens, accountability becomes selective. The squeaky problem gets attention. The quiet problem waits. The visible employee gets coached. The remote or low-drama employee receives less feedback. People begin to see standards not as steady rules but as mood, proximity, and politics. Nothing kills belief in performance management faster than that.
Small teams move faster because ownership is clearer
This is where the recent argument from Jamie Dimon deserves attention. In JPMorgan’s 2025 annual report letter, he wrote that the real competitive battles are fought by small teams authorized to move quickly, and he compared them to Navy SEALs or Delta Force units. The military language is not the point. The point is ownership. Small teams can move fast because people know who is responsible, what the goal is, and where authority lies.
That is different from flattening a large company until one manager oversees a loose collection of too many people. A small team is not just a large team with fewer bosses. It is a unit built around a clear task, bounded decision rights, and the ability to act. Firms often confuse those two ideas. They remove layers and call the result agility, even when no one has redesigned the work itself.
The result is a common management contradiction. Executives say they want speed, yet they create spans of control so wide that managers cannot keep decisions tight. They say they want ownership, yet they spread one manager across too many priorities, leaving no one close to the standard. They say they want accountability, yet they remove the layer that turns goals into daily follow-up. Small teams can be powerful. Overextended teams led by overloaded managers usually are not.
What middle managers should do when the structure is already lean
Many managers do not get to choose the structure they inherit. They still have to run the team within it. That means the first move is not to complain about the chart. It is to be honest about the role’s limits. If a manager is carrying too many direct reports and too much individual-contributor work, pretending otherwise only hides risk from those above.
Start with the basics. Clarify what only the manager can do and protect time for it. Most lists are shorter than people admit: set priorities, make trade-offs, coach key performers, address conflict, and uphold standards. Work that does not support those responsibilities should be questioned, delegated, or stopped. If the calendar is full of recurring meetings that exist only because the system lacks trust or clarity, that is a structural warning, not a badge of diligence.
Managers should also make feedback more frequent and shorter, rather than waiting for perfect review cycles. Gallup’s work on meaningful weekly feedback is helpful because it lowers the bar from ceremonial performance management to regular contact. A steady fifteen-minute conversation about recent work, priorities, and obstacles does more to preserve accountability than a polished quarterly discussion that arrives too late.
Most importantly, managers need to surface trade-offs in plain language. When new work arrives, they should answer with the cost: what will slow down, which standard will weaken, or what additional support is needed. That is not resistance. That is management. Lean structures fail fastest when everyone keeps pretending capacity is unlimited.
What senior leaders should change before flattening again
Senior leaders should stop treating span of control as a simple cost lever. Gallup’s research makes clear that the success of larger teams depends on manager talent, engagement, workload, and feedback habits. That means organizational shape should be tested the same way any other operating decision is. What kind of work is being supervised? How much variability is there? How much judgment is required? How much individual-contributor work does the manager still carry? What is the actual quality of coaching now, not the intended quality?
Leaders also need to measure more than financial savings. If management layers are reduced, watch for regrettable turnover, promotion readiness, employee engagement by team, time to resolve performance issues, and the consistency of goal setting and feedback. If those measures worsen, the structure is not getting leaner. It is getting weaker.
A second change is to separate small-team design from broad layer removal. The first can help. The second can hurt if used carelessly. A company can create fast, accountable teams around specific priorities while still preserving enough management depth to coach people, develop successors, and handle performance problems early. Those are not competing goals. They only look incompatible when leaders treat all hierarchy as waste.
Finally, senior teams should remember that the manager layer is where most employees experience the company. People do not feel strategy directly. They feel their manager. If the structure makes that relationship thinner, later, and more mechanical, employees will notice long before the executive committee does.
Conclusion
The idea behind a flatter organization is not wrong. Companies do need fewer pointless layers, clearer decision rights, and less managerial clutter. But flattening becomes self-defeating when it strips away the very capacity that keeps standards real. A business can save money by cutting managers. It can also lose far more later by weakening coaching, delaying correction, and blurring accountability among too many people.
That is the hard truth behind the current discussion. Wider spans of control do not automatically make a company faster. They make the manager’s job harder. Whether the business benefits depends on whether the remaining managers still have the talent, time, and authority to manage. If they do not, the chart may look modern while execution quietly deteriorates.
For middle managers and above, the practical lesson is simple. Do not judge a structure by how lean it looks. Judge it by whether someone still has enough room to set expectations, follow up, coach the right people, and act on missed standards before those misses spread. If the answer is no, the organization is not flatter in any useful sense. It is simply under-managed.