Getting rid of them is a big mistake

Few positions in corporate America are more thankless — or more ridiculed — than that of middle manager. Stuck between the CEO and everyone else in the office, they've long been derided as petty, powerless, thumb-twiddling bureaucrats whose job is to enforce the rules, crack the whip, and stamp out any vestige of creativity or self-initiative. Middle management, the thinking goes, is make-work for the mediocre.

But in recent weeks, as companies brace for tougher times ahead, the assault on middle managers has picked up new steam. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is eliminating layers of middle management, demoting many supervisors to the ranks of the supervised. Shopify is also reorganizing its corporate hierarchy, a "flattening" that will result in fewer managers. And Elon Musk has ordered Twitter's engineering managers to start writing "a meaningful amount" of code themselves, in addition to performing their supervisory duties.

CEOs say they're slashing away at managers in the name of efficiency. Zuckerberg offered a telling explanation for his decision: He doesn't want to have "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." His rhetoric, in fact, is part of a decades-long movement to reduce the number of middlemen in corporate America's sprawling bureaucracy. Save on overhead. Break down silos. Cut the red tape. Create, in Zuckerberg's words, "a more fun place to work." It all sounds great, right?

Except for one little thing: Middle managers are actually the ones who make large organizations work. Studies suggest they move the needle on a company's overall performance far more than senior executives do — and also make a bigger difference to the bottom line than the teams they supervise. By eliminating middle managers now, in the midst of an unprecedented shift to hybrid work, businesses are cutting the very people they need most to weather all the economic uncertainty. They're making it harder for the remaining managers to succeed. And they're sending a powerful message to talented would-be supervisors: Don't become one.