On Culture: The Missing Middle Manager - are we underinvesting in an entire generation?
The Missing Middle Manager: it's a phenomenon - still a prioritized objective to lessen middle management, still a contributor to chaos, insecurity and underinvestment. Are we skimping on an entire generation?
1. Employees feel directionless, and it's measurable.
Korn Ferry's 2025 Workforce Report surveyed 15,000 employees and found 44% of US employees report their company has cut management layers, and 40% say they now feel a lack of direction at work. While flattening the organization might boost agility and quarterly profits, it appears to be stretching executives' capacity and risks further burnout - 72% of senior executives in the US say they're stretched beyond their capabilities, compared to 47% of their global peers. These aren't vague complaints; they're specific, surveyed consequences tied directly to the structural change. Will the short-term cost savings justify decreases in senior-level retention and lower worker productivity from the lack of clarity?
2. The mentorship pipeline collapses.
More than just mentorship, it's how new employees learn . . . middle managers have been the source of instruction on how to handle tough calls, navigate politics, and get coached day-to-day. When this layer disappears, the coordination work might get reassigned - increasingly by AI - but the coaching and learning function is too often ignored. Senior execs increasingly have tens of direct reports - is this an underinvestment in training & development?Generational friction at work is having a moment. Fortune's leadership section is currently running "Gen Z can't figure out how to talk to their millennial and Gen X bosses, and it's becoming a workplace crisis," on email etiquette, jargon, and communication norms breaking down across generational lines. If you don't understand "no cap this deadline is so mid, can we push it? I'm not trying to send something that's not giving my best work fr fr," you might want to translate the sentence using Sunny Workplace's generational translator.
3. The next generation is opting out of leadership, do we have any examples of un-bossing as sustainably successful?
So does un-bossing actually work at the organizational level? Sometimes, decades-long, for companies like Gore, Morning Star, and Buurtzorg, but only when they build a deliberate replacement for what managers did (peer coaching, financial transparency, dedicated coach roles). Where companies just deleted the layer and assumed the work would disappear, Zappos, GitHub, Google in 2002, it didn't hold, and management got quietly rebuilt.
The takeaway: with a generation increasingly unwilling to fill the role even when offered, cutting middle management without redesigning around it isn't the Gore playbook. It's the Google 2002 playbook, hoping for a different result.
The corporate risk is the easy part to see. Companies that keep cutting the middle without replacing what it did are trading a visible quarterly saving for an invisible future cost: a thinner bench, a demoralized workforce, and a generation that's already told us, in survey after survey, that it doesn't want the job waiting at the top of that ladder.
But the deeper risk isn't only what happens inside the P&L. Middle management was never just a corporate function, it was important place where entire generations learned to hold responsibility for other people. How to have a hard conversation. How to make an unpopular call and live with it. How to mentor someone less experienced than you, and be mentored in turn. AI can automate the coordination work a manager did. It cannot practice being responsible for another person's growth on your behalf. Those aren't just professional skills. They're the same muscles a community needs in its volunteer leaders, its school boards, its civic organizations, its next generation of people willing to run the meeting nobody wants to run.
If companies keep removing the one place where those muscles used to get built, and this generation keeps opting out of the role even where it still exists, we're not just risking a leadership pipeline. We're risking a generation that reaches its 40s and 50s without ever having practiced the thing leadership actually is: showing up for other people, consistently, even when it's hard and thankless.
Companies can absorb a bad quarter. Communities can't as easily absorb a generation that never learned how to lead.
Yours in curiosity & discovery,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder & CEO, Culturati
p.s. I'd love to hear responses on how these objectives don't have to be mutually exclusive. Might AI (flaunting the silly executive order for SI) offer some solutions? Might Microsoft's Work Chart, McKinsey's Agentic Organization, or Jack Dorsey's Beekeeper reframe offer solutions? Culturati scholar Brian Johnson's company, Heroic, is offering Culturati readers a free master class in Leading In Uncertainty - sign up here.
Korn Ferry Reveals Workforce 2025 Research
Korn Ferry press release, April 17, 2025 Summary: Korn Ferry's annual Workforce Global Insights survey, 15,000 professionals across 15 markets including the US, UK, Brazil, UAE, Japan, and India, finds nearly half (44%) of US employees reporting cutbacks in manager levels at their organization, and 40% saying they now feel a lack of direction at work. The pressure cuts both ways: 72% of senior US executives say they're stretched beyond their capabilities, compared to 47% of their global peers. The report also surfaces sharp generational friction: 75% of Gen Z report challenges working with other generations over communication style, technology, or values, while only 45% of Baby Boomers report any problems at all, a striking asymmetry in who feels the friction. On AI, US workers skew more optimistic than the rest of the world (61% see AI's potential positively, versus nearly half of global employees who worry about being replaced within three years), but there's a confidence gap between ranks: 70% of global leaders believe they have an AI strategy, while only 39% of employees agree. |
Gen Z can’t figure out how to talk to their millennial and Gen X bosses
Fortune, September 2, 2026, Tatiana Sataua Summary: Older generations learned workplace communication by osmosis, watching how a boss wrote an email, noticing when a colleague shifted from casual to formal tone, picking up idioms like "run it up the flagpole" in the room. Gen Z entered a workforce where much of that learning happened through a screen instead, and the language on either side isn't always translating. Renée Blake, an NYU linguistics professor, frames it as a missing "work register" versus "home register" distinction. Iain Smith of Sunny Workplace, himself a millennial, notes the irony that his own generation was once subject to the same "ruining the workplace" theorizing now aimed at Gen Z; he warns that using phrases like "delulu" and "rizz" at work invites unfair judgments about professionalism from those who haven't learned the workplace vernacular yet. The piece closes on a wry generational inevitability: Gen Z won't have to wait for middle age to be confused by slang, they'll just have to wait for Gen Alpha to enter the workforce behind them. |
Conscious Unbossing: Why Gen Z Is Steering Clear Of Middle Management
Forbes, Dan Pontefract, September 28, 2024 Summary: Citing Robert Walters research, Pontefract reports that 52% of Gen Z professionals actively avoid middle management, with 69% calling the role "too high stress, low reward," and 72% saying they'd rather advance through individual expertise than by managing people. Robert Walters' Lucy Bisset frames this as a rejection of a specific style of leadership rather than leadership itself: "It's not that Gen Z doesn't respect leadership, it's that they associate management with stress, limited autonomy, and poor work-life balance." She adds: "They want to lead in ways that align with their values, through expertise, collaboration, and personal growth." Pontefract's takeaway for employers: if you want this generation in leadership eventually, the role needs redesigning around what they value, not just waiting them out. |
Strategy Summit 2026: Inventive Strategy and the ‘Unbossed’ Organization
HBR IdeaCast, Rita McGrath interviewed by Amy Bernstein, March 26, 2026 Summary: Columbia's Rita McGrath argues that as value shifts from physical assets to intangibles, "unbossed" structures become a strategic necessity, not just a culture choice. Her core case is Novartis: CEO Vasant Narasimhan shed eyecare, consumer products, and generics to center on inventive medicine, shrinking headcount from ~104,000 to 76,000, yet the combined value of everything, kept and spun off, rose from ~$120-130 billion to $510 billion today. She frames the culture as inspired, curious, and unbossed: smart people with real expertise get to act without waiting for permission. Her practical checklist: simplify relentlessly, favor small loosely coupled teams, take a long-term stewardship view, build real diversity of thought, design for trial-and-error learning, and make space for bottom-up ideas. South Korean fintech Toss is her clearest example: no manager hierarchy, a single "directly responsible individual" per project, pay tied to scope of responsibility rather than title. Crucially, McGrath stresses unbossing isn't just removing managers, Novartis invested heavily in training people to handle conflict and judgment calls a hierarchy used to absorb for them, and some leaders who couldn't adapt left. She cites Morning Star's "colleague letter of understanding," a written peer commitment replacing a manager's direction, as the model for rebuilding accountability rather than dropping it.. |
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