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Amazon is not literally abolishing middle management. In a September 2024 memo, CEO Andy Jassy asked senior-leadership organizations to increase their ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. The stated goal was to reduce bureaucracy and unnecessary organizational layers, primarily in Amazon’s corporate organizations—not to eliminate every management role or cut 15% of the company’s total workforce.
That distinction matters. Fewer layers can speed decisions and reduce pointless approvals. But management work does not disappear when a management position does. If coaching, prioritization, hiring, conflict resolution and accountability are simply transferred to overloaded executives, individual contributors or fewer remaining managers, the org chart may look flatter while the company becomes harder to run.
What Amazon actually announced
Amazon’s official target was a 15% increase in the individual-contributor-to-manager ratio. That is different from promising a 15% reduction in managers.
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For example, imagine an organization with 100 individual contributors and 20 managers. Its ratio is 5:1. A 15% increase would produce a target of 5.75 individual contributors per manager. The organization could reach that figure by removing managers, adding individual contributors, reorganizing teams, or using a combination of those changes.
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Outside analysts estimated that the initiative could affect roughly 14,000 management roles, but that was an estimate—not Amazon’s announced number. The initial change applied to corporate organizations and did not cover Amazon’s entire frontline workforce in warehouses, delivery and other operations in the same way. Amazon’s memo described the effort as reducing bureaucracy and unnecessary layers.
Several related ideas are often treated as interchangeable, but they are not:
- Reducing layers: Combining two levels of management into one.
- Increasing the ratio: Giving each manager more individual-contributor reports, or changing the mix of roles.
- Eliminating a role: Removing a position or converting it into another job.
- Cutting headcount: Reducing the number of employees, potentially for cost, performance or automation reasons.
- Reducing bureaucracy: Removing unnecessary approvals, meetings and reporting requirements.
A company can do one of these without doing all the others.
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Why a flatter organization is attractive
Amazon’s argument is straightforward: large companies can become slow because decisions pass through too many layers. Each layer may add another approval, review meeting or status report. Information can also lose detail as it moves upward, leaving senior leaders separated from operational problems.
Removing unnecessary layers can produce real benefits:
- Faster decisions: Teams may resolve reversible, operational decisions without waiting for multiple approvals.
- More autonomy: Experienced employees can take clearer ownership of outcomes.
- Less management theater: Meetings and dashboards that exist mainly to demonstrate control can be eliminated.
- Lower coordination costs: Teams may spend less time preparing updates and reconciling overlapping instructions.
- Greater executive visibility: Senior leaders may hear directly from individual contributors rather than through several layers.
- Lower payroll costs: Management roles, especially senior ones, can be expensive. However, savings depend on severance, compensation, and where the work goes next.
This is consistent with Amazon’s emphasis on ownership, small autonomous teams and what Jassy has described as operating more like a large startup. Amazon has also distinguished necessary process from excessive bureaucracy: process can support safety, quality and accountability, while unnecessary process can slow work. Fortune’s reporting covered that distinction.
Still, speed is not the same as effectiveness. A company can reduce payroll and approvals while increasing defects, employee turnover or executive bottlenecks.
“Middle manager” is not one job
Arguments about middle management often treat very different roles as though they perform identical work. They do not.
- Frontline supervisors oversee operational or service employees directly.
- People managers handle hiring, coaching, evaluations, development and team health.
- Program and project managers coordinate work across functions, sometimes without direct reports.
- Functional managers translate executive strategy into departmental priorities and execution.
- Senior managers and directors manage budgets, priorities, dependencies and sometimes other managers.
- Player-coaches combine individual-contributor output with people leadership.
Removing a manager whose job is mostly duplicative reporting is not the same as removing the person who coordinates a complex system, develops new employees or catches operational risks that do not appear in a dashboard.
That workload distinction is especially important because management is often a part-time responsibility. Gallup’s January 2026 analysis reports that 97% of surveyed managers also have individual-contributor responsibilities, and that managers spend a median 40% of their time on individual-contributor work. Gallup’s analysis warns that simply widening spans of control without redesigning the manager’s job can weaken performance management and engagement.
The work that does not disappear
Middle managers are often criticized for attending meetings and approving work. But much of their contribution is less visible.
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An executive may announce a broad priority such as improving profitability, launching a product or reducing operational risk. Teams need that priority converted into specific goals, sequencing, staffing decisions, trade-offs, quality standards and escalation paths. Managers close enough to the work can explain what is realistic while connecting it to the larger strategy.
McKinsey describes effective middle managers as a link between organizational vision and execution. Its research also finds that companies often burden managers with administrative work, leaving too little time for developing people. The implication is not that every manager should be preserved; it is that companies should remove low-value administration before assuming the entire role is low-value. McKinsey’s analysis details that connection.
They coordinate competing priorities
When two teams need the same engineer, disagree over a launch date or receive contradictory instructions, someone must make the trade-off. Without a clear decision-maker, the dispute may move upward, consume more meetings or be settled informally by whoever has the strongest relationship with leadership.
They develop and evaluate employees
Managers provide feedback, identify training needs, advocate for promotions and intervene when performance problems emerge. If a manager inherits too many reports, one-on-ones may become less frequent, feedback may arrive only during formal reviews and career development may become a self-service exercise.
Gallup’s large Q12 meta-analysis links employee engagement with outcomes including productivity, profitability, turnover, quality, absenteeism and customer loyalty. That does not prove that every manager improves every result, but it does support treating management quality and engagement as operational issues rather than optional benefits. Gallup’s research provides the broader evidence.
They carry institutional knowledge
A manager may know why a system was designed a particular way, which previous experiments failed, which customers require special handling, or which teams depend on one another. That context is often incomplete in documentation. Eliminating the role may also eliminate the person who can resolve recurring problems quickly.
Institutional knowledge is not a reason to keep every manager forever. It is a reason to identify critical knowledge and transfer it before changing the structure.
How flattening can backfire
The work is redistributed
When a management role disappears, its responsibilities usually move somewhere else—to a vice president, another manager, a senior individual contributor, an HR partner or a project-management function. If the receiving person lacks capacity, authority or training, the organization has not removed the work. It has hidden the workload.
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Spans of control become too wide
There is no universal ideal number of direct reports. A manager overseeing six experienced employees doing similar work faces a different challenge from one overseeing 15 people across disciplines, locations and experience levels.
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Span-of-control decisions should account for:
- Work complexity and ambiguity.
- Team experience and independence.
- Geographic distribution and time zones.
- Regulatory, safety or customer risk.
- How frequently coaching is needed.
- The number of active projects and dependencies.
- The manager’s own individual-contributor workload.
Wider spans can work in standardized, well-documented environments with experienced teams and strong systems. They are more dangerous when managers retain substantial individual-contributor duties while taking on many additional reports.
Accountability becomes unclear
A flatter structure can leave employees unsure who makes the final decision, who evaluates performance, who approves hiring, who resolves conflicts and who owns a missed target. “Everyone owns it” can become “no one is accountable.”
Executives become bottlenecks
Fewer formal layers may initially improve access to senior leaders. At scale, however, executives can become the approval point for too many decisions. The hierarchy has not disappeared; it has moved upward, often with less operational context.
Informal hierarchy replaces formal hierarchy
Influence does not vanish when a title disappears. Employees may instead rely on the most senior person in a meeting, a technical expert, a well-connected colleague or an unofficial gatekeeper. Research on supervisor removal in a specific manufacturing setting found that supervisory relationships can reappear informally, although that finding should not be generalized mechanically to Amazon. The study is available through ScienceDirect.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Amazon’s AI-era complication
Amazon’s management-ratio initiative also sits within broader changes to corporate work. In 2025, Jassy said generative AI and AI agents would reduce or transform some corporate work, creating a need for fewer people in certain roles and more people in others. Reuters reported that Amazon’s corporate workforce could shrink as AI automates routine tasks. That report should be read as a separate development, not proof that every management reduction was caused by AI.
AI may reduce routine coordination, reporting and administrative work. It may also increase the need for human judgment, governance, risk review, change management and technical translation. Automating a status report is not the same as automating the decision about whether a project is safe to launch or whether an employee needs support.
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In April 2026, Reuters reported that Amazon was replacing traditional job titles with the catch-all title “builder” in two units. That suggests changing role design and an emphasis on employees who can solve problems with AI and operate with fewer supporting roles; it does not prove that management has become unnecessary. Reuters’ report describes the change.
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What companies should remove instead
The best approach is a function-based audit, not a title-based purge. Before eliminating a management role, leaders should ask:
- What decisions does this person make?
- What recurring problems do they solve?
- Which teams depend on them?
- How much time do they spend coaching and developing employees?
- Who will perform each responsibility if the role disappears?
- Does that person have enough capacity and authority?
- Can software, documentation or process redesign replace the work?
- What leading indicator would show that the change is failing?
- Can the reorganization be tested as a reversible pilot?
This audit may identify redundant approvals, meetings without decisions, duplicated reports, managers with no meaningful decision rights and layers that merely forward information. It should preserve technical judgment, talent development, cross-functional coordination, risk management, customer escalation and organizational memory.
Organizations considering flatter structures should also:
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors- Create credible individual-contributor career paths so promotion does not require managing people.
- Separate people management from project coordination when those are different jobs.
- Set span-of-control ranges based on complexity rather than imposing one universal ratio.
- Train player-coaches before adding reports.
- Document critical institutional knowledge before reorganizing.
- Publish who owns transferred responsibilities.
- Measure outcomes after the change instead of treating the new org chart as proof of success.
How to tell whether flattening is working
A successful reorganization should improve speed without weakening execution or employee support. Companies should track:
- Decision cycle time and the number of approval steps.
- Product, project and hiring delivery times.
- Defects, rework and customer escalations.
- Employee and manager engagement.
- Manager workload, burnout and one-on-one frequency.
- Voluntary turnover among high performers.
- Internal promotion and development rates.
- Cross-team dependency delays.
- The number of decisions escalated to executives.
- Incidents caused by unclear ownership.
If decisions become faster but quality, retention, coaching or accountability deteriorate, the company has likely cut capability along with bureaucracy.
The bottom line for employees and investors
For employees, “fewer managers” can mean a layer is removed, a manager becomes an individual contributor, responsibilities are consolidated or a job is eliminated. A title change alone does not reveal which outcome occurred. The practical question is whether reporting lines, decision rights, workload and career opportunities changed.
For investors and business leaders, a lower management ratio is not automatically a productivity gain. It is valuable only if the company removes unnecessary coordination while preserving the work that keeps teams effective.
Amazon may be right that large organizations accumulate bureaucracy and redundant layers. It may be wrong if it treats the number of managers as the problem instead of examining what those managers actually do. The right question is not how many managers can be eliminated. It is which management work adds value, which work is bureaucracy, and who will perform the valuable work after the structure changes.
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