Is Middle Management Disappearing?

Is middle management disappearing? Not exactly, but it is being stretched thinner than at any point Gallup has measured. Gallup's own workforce data shows the average manager's span of control jumping from 10.9 direct reports in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, a one year move inside a longer climb the firm calls nearly a 50 percent increase in team size since it first measured span of control in 2013. Fewer managers are not managing nothing. They are managing more people each, with less time left over for any one of them.

Is middle management disappearing, according to the data

Gallup's analysis draws on 44,025 employees and 16,442 managers surveyed from 2022 to 2025, plus a meta-analysis of 312 studies covering 92,252 teams and nearly 898,000 employees across 26 industries and 46 countries. The median manager still oversees about five to six people, a number that has barely moved, so the average is being pulled up by a specific group. Thirteen percent of managers now oversee 25 people or more, and that share, not the typical team, accounts for most of the year over year jump in the average span. Middle management is not vanishing so much as concentrating into fewer, wider roles.

Why spans of control are widening

About two in three managers still oversee fewer than 10 people, so the widening span is not universal. It shows up where companies have already cut layers, and a wider span left in place after a layer disappears is a visible fingerprint of that cut. Gallup's own engagement research ties the sharpest regional drop it measured, an eight point fall in South Asia, to exactly this pattern: fewer manager roles, wider spans, the same work still needing to get done. A flatter chart looks efficient on paper. The people still on it are the ones absorbing the difference.

What a wider span means for coaching and feedback

A manager with more reports does not get more hours in the day. Ninety seven percent of managers still carry individual contributor work on top of managing people, a median of 40 percent of their time, so the hours available for any one report's coaching and feedback were already thin before a team got bigger. Spread the same manager across 12 people instead of 9, and the honest math is less individual attention per person, not more, whatever the org chart says about who reports to whom.

Why manager attention decides whether AI adoption sticks

The squeeze reaches further than performance reviews. Global manager engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025, a nine point drop with five of those points lost in the single year between 2024 and 2025 alone, based on Gallup's ongoing survey of more than 260,000 employees worldwide in 2025 alone. That matters for AI specifically: Gallup's own research finds that aside from whether the technology is actually rolled out, the strongest predictor of whether an employee uses AI at all is whether their direct manager actively champions it. A manager stretched across more people, and less engaged to begin with, has less bandwidth left to be that champion for any one of them.

What this means for how you prove your own skill

None of this is a verdict on any one manager or any one company, and a wider span is not a fixed sentence either. Gallup's own data shows managers in what it calls best practice organizations staying engaged at 79 percent, nearly four times the global average, so the difference is how well an organization supports a bigger team, not whether spans widen at all. Either way, less time from any one manager means an individual habit of deciding for yourself what to hand to AI and what to keep doing by hand carries more of the weight it used to share with a manager's feedback, and a documented, checkable claim about what you can actually do travels further than a title on an org chart that may not even show who your manager is anymore. The six non technical domains the check measures are exactly the kind of proof that does not depend on a manager having the hours to write it down first.

The honest limit

This is workforce survey data, not a single company's org chart, and it says nothing about whether any specific reader's own manager is stretched or supported. Two out of three managers still run teams under 10 people, so a jump to 25 or more reports is a real but concentrated shift, not yet the norm. What the data does say plainly is that where layers get cut, the manager left standing has less time per person, and that gap is worth planning around whether or not it applies to your own team today.