What managers do now
that part of every team is agents.

In September 2024, Andy Jassy told Amazon’s corporate staff what too many managers had done to the company. Growth had added layers, and the layers had produced “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings,” a longer line of managers who felt they had to review a topic before it moved, and owners who stopped making recommendations “because the decision will be made elsewhere.” His fix was a number. Every senior leadership organization had to raise its ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. He also opened a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for anyone who spotted process worth killing.

Thirteen months later, Amazon’s head of people, Beth Galetti, announced a reduction of about 14,000 corporate roles. Her reasoning used the same words: the company needed to be “organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.” Few CEOs have worked out what the managers who remain are supposed to do all day, once part of each team is software.

15%

Minimum rise in the ratio of individual contributors to managers Amazon required by the end of Q1 2025.

12.1

Average direct reports per US manager in 2025, up from 10.9 a year earlier, per Gallup.

22%

Share of managers worldwide who were engaged at work in 2025, down from 27%, per Gallup.

20%

Organizations that Gartner expects to use AI to cut more than half their middle management roles, through 2026.

The largest employers cut the same layer

Amazon was not alone. At Microsoft, CFO Amy Hood told investors on the April 2025 earnings call that the company was “increasing our agility by reducing layers with fewer managers.” In May it cut about 6,000 jobs, and in July close to 9,100 more, according to Fortune. Phil Spencer told the Xbox organization it would “follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.”

Meta made the argument about decisions explicit. When it cut roughly 600 roles from its AI organization in October 2025, chief AI officer Alexandr Wang wrote in an internal memo reported by Axios: “By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact.”

Gartner had predicted the direction a year earlier. In its October 2024 list of top predictions, it said 20% of organizations would use AI to flatten their structure through 2026, removing more than half of their middle management positions, because AI can automate scheduling, reporting and performance monitoring and so widen each manager’s span of control. The same paragraph lists the costs: managers “feeling overwhelmed with additional direct reports,” and mentoring and learning pathways that “may become broken.” Those two warnings are the subject of this note. In an earlier note I looked at the org charts Block, Coinbase and Fiverr published. This one looks at a single box on those charts: the manager.

What got cut was the routing work

Read Jassy’s complaint again and look at what he lists. Pre-meetings, reviews before a topic can move, decisions made one level away from the work. All of it is routing: carrying information up, carrying approvals down, keeping people aligned. For most of the last century that was a large share of a middle manager’s week, and it is the share software now handles best. An agent can compile a status update from the ticket system and the CRM.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 countries published in April 2025, describes where it thinks this goes. It calls the companies furthest along “Frontier Firms,” built around hybrid teams of people and agents, and predicts every employee becomes an “agent boss”: someone who builds, delegates to and manages agents. It proposes a new metric, the human-agent ratio, meaning how many agents a role needs and how many people it takes to guide them. 82% of leaders said they were confident they would use digital labor to expand workforce capacity within 12 to 18 months, and 28% of managers said they were considering hiring AI workforce managers to lead hybrid teams.

Microsoft sells the agents, so I discount the forecast. The ratio is the useful part: it admits that agents need supervising, and someone’s week pays for it.

Agents hand every manager a second team

The best evidence on what that supervision costs comes from the company furthest ahead. In its October 2026 report How employment is changing at Anthropic, the company measured its own staff. Meta-work, meaning specs for multi-agent runs, agents reviewing other agents and pipeline monitoring, grew from 10% of the average employee’s interactive sessions in fall 2025 to 22% in spring 2026. Claude sat idle about 80% of the time, waiting for a person. The median employee spent 20% more time in meetings than a year earlier, and in an April 2026 internal survey, 20% of employees answering an open-ended question described a role “shifting from actually doing work to managing Claudes.”

Two findings matter most for managers. First, managers’ code commits doubled: the people supervising technical teams build and ship more themselves. Second, the authors note that agents “become teams for a single employee, rather than nodes with high connectivity to many employees at once.” A lead with ten people now oversees ten people who each run a small team of agents, and every one of those agent teams produces output that someone has to read, judge and sign.

The report also shows what happens to decisions. Hard problems that agents surface end up needing people in a room, and work done in private becomes a liability because agents only know what is written down. The authors conclude that “working and deciding in the open is critical at an AI-intensive organization.” For a manager, that turns a habit into a duty: if a decision is not written where the agents can read it, the team’s agents will keep working from the old one.

Wider spans only work under conditions Gallup can name

So flattening raises the number of people per manager at the same moment agents raise the output per person. Gallup’s January 2026 study of span of control shows the first half already happening in the US. Average direct reports rose from 10.9 to 12.1 in a year, nearly 50% more than when Gallup first measured in 2013, pulled up by a growing minority of teams with 25 or more people. The median stays at six.

The managers are paying for it. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports that global manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025, the largest one-year drop it has recorded for the group. Managers, it writes, “used to enjoy an ‘engagement premium’ at work, but they are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead.” In South Asia, where the share of managers fell, manager engagement fell eight points, and Gallup names organizational flattening as a possible factor.

The span study also says when wide spans work. Manager talent matters more than team size: strong managers stay engaged with 25 or more direct reports. Individual contributor work has a ceiling: the median manager spends 40% of their time on it, and those above that line tend to run smaller teams. And the weekly conversation carries the weight: employees who strongly agree they got meaningful feedback in the past week are about seven in ten engaged regardless of team size, against one in four otherwise. Gallup says 15 to 30 minutes, held consistently, is enough. Its own summary is blunt: “increasing span of control alone is not a performance strategy.”

A manager role, redesigned

Here is how we would rewrite one role. Take a finance operations lead at a 400-person distributor. Today she has seven direct reports in accounts payable, receivables and the monthly close, plus one supervisor between her and the clerks. A large part of her week goes to status meetings, approval chains and reconciling the numbers her team reports to the controller. After the redesign the supervisor role is gone, she has eleven direct reports, and agents handle invoice matching, first-pass reconciliations and the variance commentary. Her job description gets four parts, each with a time budget and something she owns.

People, about 30% of the week. A 20 to 30 minute conversation with each person every week, on goals, recent work and what they are learning. Hiring and promotion cases. Deciding which junior work stays human so her people still build judgment.

The agent system, about 25%. She owns the standing instructions every agent on her team works from, each with a named author and a review date. She owns the review rules: which outputs a person signs before they leave the team, which get sampled, and what share. She reads a weekly sample herself, and she decides when an agent’s scope grows or shrinks.

Decisions, about 20%. A written list of what she decides alone, what she escalates and what her people decide without her. Every decision she makes goes into the team’s decision log the same day, so people and agents work from the same version.

Her own build work, capped at 25%. She improves one process a quarter herself, so she still knows what the work looks like up close. Gallup’s data suggests this share is where wide spans break, so the cap is written into the role.

Three things leave the role, by name: compiling status reports, relaying approvals that her people can make, and pre-meetings. Her scorecard changes with it: close cycle time, error rate in agent output caught after sign-off, regretted attrition, and the share of her people who say they had a meaningful conversation with her that week.

Set the span from a weekly hours budget

The practical rule we use is simple arithmetic. Before widening a span, add up a manager’s week from the redesigned role. Count about an hour and a half per direct report for the weekly conversation, coaching and reviewing their work. Add the measured hours that report’s agent output takes to review and sign; this is the line most plans leave out, and Anthropic’s data says it is growing. Add six to eight hours for decisions and cross-team work, and cap build work at a quarter of the week. If the total runs past 45 hours, the span is too wide for this role, whatever the target ratio says.

For the finance lead, eleven people at an hour and a half is about 16 hours. If agent review averages 40 minutes per person per week, that adds seven. Decisions take seven, build work ten. The total is about 41 hours, which fits. If agent review grows to two hours per person, the same span runs to 55 hours, and either the review rules change or the team splits.

What to do this quarter

For two weeks, have every manager in one function log their time in five buckets: routing, people, agent oversight, decisions and their own work. The routing bucket is what you can remove without removing a person.

Remove the routing first. Kill the status meetings that an agent-compiled report can replace, and push the approvals Jassy described down to the people doing the work. Then rewrite one manager role per function using the four parts above, with time budgets and named artifacts, and run the hours budget before any span changes.

Pick managers for the people part of the job. Gallup’s finding that talent beats team size is the strongest argument in this note, and it means the managers you keep through a flattening matter more than the number you cut.

Finally, add one question to your monthly operating review: what share of each team says it had a meaningful conversation with its manager this week. If that number falls while spans widen, the flattening has gone too far.