One global firm announced last week that it was cutting 20% of its managers. Across the US, companies are now going after a specific target: managers with between one and four direct reports. On a spreadsheet they look like the obvious trim, a salary and a title wrapped around a team that could be absorbed by the group next door.
We think that trim is a false economy. The small-team manager is where companies grow their managers, and eliminating the role hands the survivors a player-coach job that almost nobody can do well, at the very moment the organisation has stopped training anyone to do it.
The trend is laid out in Korn Ferry's This Week in Leadership column of September 9. Managers now oversee an average of 12.1 workers each, up from 10.9 in 2024, and Korn Ferry, citing Gallup, puts the growth in the teams they are responsible for at 50% since 2013. On top of bigger teams, managers are increasingly expected to be working members of the team who generate revenue themselves.
The arithmetic of attention does not flex
Korn Ferry's Mark Royal offers a rule of thumb that deserves to be pinned above every reorganisation plan. A manager with 10 to 15 people can hold two or three one-on-ones a day and see everyone individually each week. At 20, the best case is alternate weeks, and the meetings drift into status check-ins. That calculation assumes the manager does nothing else. Add a revenue target, as the player-coach model does, and the numbers get worse before the next restructuring rolls another group under the same person.
What gets dropped is predictable. Royal's worry, in the column, is that people-managing tasks are what gets crowded out: career development, feedback, understanding what each person is trying to achieve. A stretched player-coach keeps managing, but by complaint, giving their limited attention to the squeakiest wheels. The quiet performer who is thinking about leaving gets a calendar slot every other Thursday, if the client call doesn't run long.
The saving from removing the small-team manager shows up in one quarter's headcount figures. The cost arrives later and somewhere else, in stalled development and in decisions that wait because nobody has time to make them, while good people drift out. It rarely gets traced back to the cut that caused it.
The cheapest manager to cut is the one you were about to promote
The more damaging effect is slower. Managing three people is how most people find out whether they can manage at all. It is a role with low stakes and fast feedback, where a new manager can make the ordinary mistakes (the avoided conversation, the over-delegated project) without wrecking a department. The Korn Ferry column notes, almost in passing, that cutting these roles means hiring fewer first-time managers, and most of what follows comes from that one clause.
A stretched player-coach keeps managing, but by complaint.
At the other end of the pipeline, companies that have removed the training ground go looking for managers who arrive fully formed: able to oversee multiple groups, lead them, and be the biggest biller on the team. JP Sniffen, who leads Korn Ferry's Military Center of Expertise, calls the expectation maddening and describes his response to these job specs bluntly: "I often find myself saying, 'This person doesn't exist.'" The organisation used to have a way of producing something close to that person, and it eliminated it to save money.
The likely outcome, by Korn Ferry's account, is a compromise hire or an empty seat. Both carry a concentrated risk that flat structures rarely price in. When restructurings fold groups together, one manager inherits far more scope with no relief, and Sniffen's warning is that a bad manager over several groups spoils a much larger swath of the business. In a layered organisation, a poor manager's damage stays with a handful of people; a flattened one hands that manager several teams at once.
We accept much of that. Royal's sweet-spot research cuts against tiny teams as surely as against sprawling ones, and some consolidation of two-person fiefdoms is overdue. Yet the benefits of flattening assume something the current wave of cuts removes: a manager with enough time to push decisions down. A player-coach with 20 reports and a revenue number triages the team. Decision rights do not migrate to the front line just because the layer above it disappeared; in our view they go to whoever still has time to make them, which is often someone further up. If a manager of three is micromanaging, the role was badly designed. Redesign it as a deliberate apprenticeship, with clear scope and a path to a bigger team, and keep the rung.
The AI rationale makes this worse. Many experts, Korn Ferry reports, blame the renewed pruning on executives who believe the technology can absorb the tracking work managers do. Shanda Mints, who leads AI strategy and transformation at the firm, argues that companies need more managers to walk employees through AI adoption, and that "if someone is thinking that AI is going to solve management problems, they are actually complicating the problem." She is right, and her point strengthens the pipeline argument. Tracking was never the hard part of the job. Once the software handles the dashboards, what remains is coaching people through changing work, which is precisely what a manager of fifteen with a quota has no hours left for.
Decision rights do not migrate to the front line just because the layer above it disappeared.
For leaders, the decision turns on what the small-team role is for, more than on any span-of-control target. If it exists only because someone once needed a title, cut it. If it is where the next generation of managers learns to hold a difficult conversation, it is the cheapest management training the company will ever buy, and it pays much of its own salary in work done. The job-search experts in the Korn Ferry column advise hirers to lower their expectations of what new managers can arrive with. A better fix is to keep the place where those skills were built.
Companies thinning out the managers of three are clearing the bench that was supposed to supply the managers of fifteen. In a few years they will be writing job specs for player-coaches who can lead several groups and top the billing chart, and they will blame the candidate pool when nobody fits. The candidates were there; the firm cut the job that would have made them.
