When Flattening Structures Becomes Another Form of Bureaucracy
Chine Mmegwa reached November 2025 managing three people. Three months later, his team grew to 24 collaborators across three continents. Not because his area launched a new product or because he captured a previously untapped market. The reason was more prosaic: Match Group —owner of Tinder, Hinge, and OKCupid— reduced its workforce by 13%, eliminating about 325 positions and removing layers of middle management. The practical result for Mmegwa was an addition of ten extra hours a week in meetings: three 90-minute group sessions, weekly one-on-one sessions with his six direct reports, and bi-weekly meetings with the rest of the team. His calendar became his primary work tool.
This is not a mere anecdote. According to an annual Gallup survey published in January 2026, the average manager in the United States supervised 8.2 people in 2013. By 2025, that number rose to 12.1. And 13% of current managers have 25 reports or more, two percentage points higher than the previous year. The statistic that should concern any operations director the most: 97% of these managers also perform individual contributor work alongside their leadership responsibilities. In other words, nearly all middle-management positions in the U.S. market are doing two jobs simultaneously, with neither receiving the attention it deserves.
The official narrative behind this trend, informally dubbed the Great Flattening, is alluring: fewer hierarchies, faster decisions, greater closeness between the CEO and those who execute. Match Group's Chief Operating Officer summarized it succinctly: "We restructured mainly by eliminating layers of management. The idea was to move faster." No one disputes that goal. What merits dissection is whether the chosen mechanism truly achieves this, or if it merely transfers the bottleneck from one hierarchical level to another.
What Managerial Math Reveals When Put to the Test
By eliminating a layer of middle management, a company reduces its payroll in that segment. The savings are immediate and quantifiable. Match Group cut 325 positions in 2024 under pressure from activist investors questioning performance amidst a shrinking Generation Z user base. The numbers on the balance sheet improve. But the work that those eliminated managers performed does not vanish; it is redistributed among those who remain.
That is precisely what Gallup's data describes accurately. When a manager moves from supervising 9 people to overseeing 12 or 24, their ability to perform strategic follow-ups per person declines proportionally. Not because they are less capable, but because time is finite. Mmegwa involuntarily confirms this when he describes his management method: meticulously scheduled meetings, a calendar that serves as a navigation guide. That rigidity is not a symptom of efficiency; it is a symptom of a system without wiggle room.
Chris Kaufman, a leadership consultant, points out that larger teams eliminate bottlenecks and bring the best collaborators closer to the executive suite. That may hold true for the top percentile of each team. The problem is that people management does not only work with the best: it requires constant attention to those who perform at average levels, those undergoing learning curves, and those who need context to make autonomous decisions. With 24 people and ten extra hours of meetings weekly, Mmegwa's ability to identify those weak signals is significantly reduced. The manager who could previously gauge the temperature of his team through informal conversations now operates mainly through formal and scheduled instances.
Indeed's data reinforces this interpretation: employers posted 12.3% fewer job openings for mid-level management positions in 2025 compared to 2024. Companies are not hiring replacements; they are betting that the system works with fewer parts. That bet has a cost that financial statements do not immediately capture: the degradation of management capital and the deterioration of employee engagement as they perceive their professional development relies on a manager who barely has time to read a message.
Agility Not Validated with the Team Is Not Agility
Match Group implemented a one-day in-person workshop for new and mid-level managers, focused on building trust within teams. This is a tangible initiative, better than doing nothing. However, it also reveals the magnitude of the problem they are trying to solve: when a company needs a formal program to rebuild internal trust after a restructuring, the restructuring created a fracture that now requires investment to repair. The cost of cutting isn’t just severance payments.
The pattern exhibited by Match Group is not exclusive to them. Meta, Citigroup, Amazon, and UPS have adopted flatter structures with similar arguments. All faced the same underlying problem: the decision-making speed promised by flat structures depends on collaborators having enough clarity to decide independently. That clarity does not automatically arise from the removal of a hierarchical level. It is built with time, context, and a manager capable of genuinely supporting that process. When that manager oversees 24 people and simultaneously performs as an individual contributor, the time to build that clarity simply does not exist.
What organizations executing flat structures well have in common is that they do not confuse reducing layers with reducing support. Flattening a structure works when accompanied by clear information systems, well-defined autonomy by decision level, and short feedback cycles that do not solely depend on the manager's agenda. Without those elements, what occurs is not speed; it is a manager turned into a server of multiple simultaneous fronts, addressing the urgent while indefinitely postponing the strategic.
The more subtle risk of this model is not manager burnout, though that is also a documented issue. The greater risk is the erosion of decision quality at the level where the work is executed. When collaborators do not receive timely feedback, they do not adjust their work on time. When the manager has no room to think about team development, talent either stagnates or leaves. These effects do not show up in the balance sheet of the quarter when the cut was made. They appear twelve to eighteen months later, when the company seeks to understand why productivity did not improve despite having reduced costs.
Team Size Doesn't Determine Organizational Speed
The variable that really determines whether a flat structure works is not the ratio of reports per manager; it is the quality of the system surrounding that manager: what information is available to them in real time, what decisions they can confidently delegate, and what level of operational autonomy their collaborators have without needing approval. Match Group is building part of that system with its training program. However, an annual workshop doesn’t replace the management infrastructure eliminated by cutting 325 positions.
Organizations that have learned to scale without multiplying friction did not do so by reducing managers. They did it by reducing the dependency on the manager as the sole point of context, criteria, and direction transmission. That requires documenting how decisions are made, what information is relevant at each level, and how progress is measured without needing a follow-up meeting. No organizational chart solves that problem by itself.
The only way to build an organization that moves quickly in a sustained manner is to continuously validate that the executing individuals have what they need to decide well, frequently adjust that validation, and not wait for problems to escalate until they become visible in the numbers. Restructuring plans that only optimize the organizational chart without testing those hypotheses in real time merely push the problem forward.
