Amazon, Google, Meta and Citi have all cut management layers since 2023. Here's why the 'great flattening' is quietly overloading India's mid-level managers.
Key takeaways
- Since 2023, Amazon, Google, Meta and Citigroup have all publicly cut management layers or explicitly widened manager-to-team ratios, and the trend has continued into 2025 and 2026 as more companies follow.
- In September 2024, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy directed teams to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by Q1 2025, in a memo that explicitly named "bureaucracy" as the target.
- A widely cited Gartner analysis found the average manager's span of control had grown roughly 2.7x over six years, a shift most L&D functions never budgeted a training response for.
- Flattening is designed to speed up decisions and cut cost, but nobody redesigned the manager's job to match. The training and support a manager received for six reports is still what they get for fourteen.
- The fix isn't hiring more managers back. It's building coaching capability, structured multi-rater feedback, and readiness assessment that scale a manager's effectiveness without scaling headcount.
Last updated · Bodhih Insights team
Nobody trained him for this. He was a good manager for a team of six: he knew names, families, the one person who needed a Monday check-in and the one who needed to be left alone. At fourteen, that same instinct-led style breaks down completely, and Karthik is not an outlier. He is the default outcome of a restructuring trend now running through nearly every large employer in the world, and it has a name: the great flattening.
A Trend With a Paper Trail
"Delayering" isn't a rumour passed around in townhalls. It has a public paper trail. Sundar Pichai told Google employees in 2023 that the company would cut management layers to move faster. Meta's 2023 "Year of Efficiency" explicitly targeted middle-management roles, with Mark Zuckerberg saying flatter orgs would let decisions get made closer to the work. Citigroup's 2024 reorganisation under Jane Fraser removed entire layers of management as part of a broader simplification. And Amazon's Andy Jassy was the most direct of all: his September 2024 memo told organisations to raise the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% within two quarters, calling out "unnecessary layers" by name.
None of these companies described this as a training initiative. They described it as speed and cost. But every one of them, without saying so, just handed their remaining managers a materially bigger job.
The Math Nobody Put in a Slide
Gartner's often-cited analysis on this puts a number to what Karthik felt: the average manager's span of control has grown roughly 2.7-fold over about six years. A manager who was coaching, appraising and developing five or six people is now often doing the same for twelve to fifteen, sometimes more, and doing it with a to-do list, a calendar and a communication style that was calibrated for the smaller number.
This isn't just an "I'm busier now" problem. Span of control has a well-documented relationship with the depth of a manager's involvement in any one person's development. Beyond a certain team size, one-on-ones shrink from a real conversation to a status update, coaching gets replaced by triage, and the manager quietly shifts from developing people to simply keeping the lights on for all of them. It's a straight line from a flatter org chart to the kind of silent disengagement patterns Indian workplaces are already grappling with elsewhere in the system.
Why India's GCCs Feel This First
Global capability centres have absorbed a disproportionate share of this shift. Many GCCs in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Gurugram mirror the org design decisions made at headquarters, but the manager promoted into a newly-widened role here is, on average, younger and earlier in their own leadership journey than a counterpart managing a comparable team size abroad. A 29-year-old team lead absorbing two flattened layers overnight doesn't just inherit more names on a reporting line; they inherit performance conversations, career conversations and conflict conversations they've never had to run at that scale, with no additional runway to learn the job before it changes under them.
This is also where the promotion pipeline gets exposed. Someone who was an excellent manager of six was promoted, implicitly, into managing fourteen, with the assumption that competence scales linearly with headcount. It rarely does. The skills that make a great manager of six, mostly interpersonal and situational, are not automatically the skills that make a great manager of fourteen, which increasingly require structure, delegation frameworks and the discipline to coach through others rather than personally.
What Actually Scales With the Org Chart
Three interventions consistently separate organisations where flattening works from organisations where it just quietly breaks their best managers.
The first is coaching as a trained, repeatable skill rather than a personality trait. A manager going from six to fourteen reports cannot run fourteen deep, intuitive relationships the way they ran six. What scales instead is a coaching framework, a structured way to run a one-on-one, ask the right question and know when to intervene, which is exactly the gap coaching programmes like Pewple are built to close for managers who are being asked to do more with the same twenty-four hours.
The second is replacing manager instinct with structured, multi-rater feedback. When a manager can no longer personally track the trajectory of every one of fourteen people, the organisation needs another mechanism to catch drift early. This is precisely the role 360-degree feedback tools like Jobulary360 play: specific, behavioural input from peers and reports that surfaces a problem before it becomes an exit interview, regardless of how stretched the manager's own bandwidth is.
The third is assessing readiness before widening a span of control, not after. Behavioural assessment platforms like AssessAll exist to answer a question most flattening decisions skip entirely: does this person have the delegation, resilience and communication profile to manage fourteen well, or are they simply the most senior person of six who happened to be standing there when the layer above them disappeared? Getting that answer before the org chart changes is far cheaper than discovering it afterwards, in attrition.
None of these three require adding management layers back. They require training and tooling built for the width of team a manager actually has now, not the width they were trained for two org-design cycles ago.
Frequently asked questions
What is "the great flattening" in corporate organisations?
The great flattening refers to the widespread trend, visible at companies including Amazon, Google, Meta and Citigroup since 2023, of removing layers of middle management to speed up decision-making and cut costs. The direct consequence is a much wider span of control for the managers who remain, often without a corresponding change in how they are trained or supported.
How much has the average manager's span of control actually grown?
A widely cited Gartner analysis found the average manager's span of control grew roughly 2.7 times over about six years. Individual company moves make the scale concrete: Amazon's September 2024 internal memo, for instance, directed teams to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% within two quarters.
Why does flattening hit Indian GCC managers particularly hard?
Global capability centres in India often mirror headquarters' org design decisions, but the managers absorbing widened teams here are, on average, earlier in their own leadership careers than counterparts managing similarly sized teams elsewhere. They inherit a much larger set of performance, career and conflict conversations without additional time to build the delegation and coaching skills that scale a manager's effectiveness beyond a small, closely-supervised team.
What should L&D teams do when management layers are cut?
Three things move the needle without adding headcount back: train remaining managers in structured coaching so they can be effective across a larger team, introduce continuous multi-rater feedback (such as 360-degree feedback) so drift is caught even when a manager's personal bandwidth is stretched, and use behavioural readiness assessment before widening someone's span of control, not after problems surface.
