Bonfire of the middle managers

Why firms are 'delayering'.

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Middle managers never have it easy. Subordinates resent them for climbing the corporate ladder.

The top brass blame them when company strategy fails. In the popular mind, they personify corporate bloat; they are the stuff of satire rather than respect. Stress and burnout are their lot.

But lately, they have had an especially hard time. Lots of them are losing their jobs. In August, Google said it had cut 35 per cent of its managers overseeing teams of fewer than three. In September, Fiverr, a freelancing marketplace, said it would shed managers to focus more on artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon has been trimming all year in its effort to improve efficiency - most recently in July, at its cloud-computing arm. Meta's Mr Mark Zuckerberg has been complaining about “managers managing managers” since 2023.

And that's just in tech. So far in 2025, phrases relating to “reducing management layers” have been mentioned 98 times on the earning calls of companies in S&P's global stock market index, twice as often as in the whole of 2022.

The list includes UBS, a Swiss bank; Reckitt Benckiser, a British consumer-goods company; and Air Liquide, a French maker of industrial gases. What is behind this bout of “unbossing”?