Half of your managers are going to disappear. At least according to Gartner.
Picture 2028.
You're looking for a job. Title: "Senior Team Manager."
You get a response back: "We don't hire for those positions anymore. We work differently."
You look at their website. No classic org chart. Pods instead. Owners instead. No "unit manager."
You think these are small Silicon Valley companies. Then you look at the logo — an Israeli insurance company. 4,000 employees.
Yeah.
What Gartner Saw
Gartner — the research firm that large organizations pay a lot of money to know what's coming — published a forecast that flew under the radar.
By 2026, 20% of organizations will remove more than 50% of their middle management positions. Not cut. Not freeze hiring. Remove.
78% of surveyed HR leaders said that roles and processes need to change completely. 60% recommended breaking power structures from the previous era.
(That's not usually what comes out of HR departments.)
And it's already happening: 41% of employees report having fewer managers than three years ago. Not because of layoffs. Because of structural change.
The future of work, according to Gartner, doesn't arrive as an announcement. It arrives quietly.
What's Actually Happening Here
Ask yourself: what does a middle manager do on a regular day?
Know what's happening with the team. Pass it up. Get a decision. Pass it down. Filter, interpret, translate.
AI does that part now. Faster. Without forgetting. Without filtering what "shouldn't go up."
Gartner adds one specific stat that explains everything: AI enables one manager to oversee 50 to 100 agents simultaneously. If until now a manager managed 7 to 10 people — the math is simple. You need fewer managers.
If This Is Happening — What Changes
Status meetings disappear. That alone is worth hours a week for everyone.
Managers who stay shift from managing information to managing meaning. Explaining why we do what we do. Saying "I don't know" without it feeling like failure. That's completely different work — and not everyone will be good at it.
Units organize around outcomes, not functions. Not "customer service department" but "the team responsible for customer retention." The difference sounds semantic. It isn't.
In hiring: "Team Lead" and "unit manager" start to lose value. What you're looking for is people who can own an outcome — not a process.
Who Wins
People who never waited for someone to tell them what to do — finally the environment suits them.
The managers who stay — if they survive the filter — manage more, earn more. The filter will hurt. But those who come through it will be fine.
Customers: less "transferred to an authorized party." More answers.
And small companies that could never afford deep management layers — suddenly competing on the same field as the big ones. (That, if you ask me, is the most interesting thing about this whole story.)
Who Loses
Straight to the point.
Middle managers whose main job is running meetings, reporting, coordinating — that's the highest-risk category. Not "maybe they'll change their role." The role is going to disappear as a category.
Those who excelled at managing the boss — knowing exactly what they wanted to hear and delivering it — discover that advantage is worth less in a transparent environment.
And those who dismantle the management layer too fast without building an alternative culture will discover that transparency alone doesn't manage an organization. Gartner specifically warns about this: 37% of employees report feeling lost without middle management. Turns out a good manager gave you more than reports — meaning, identity, belonging. And AI doesn't replace that.
Questions I'm Still Circling
What happens to a manager who was really good at managing people — but not at direct work? Do they just go home?
The 20% Gartner talks about — will they pull the other 80% along? Or will the 80% look and decide it's not relevant to them?
And how do you tell people their management layer was removed without it looking like layoffs in disguise?
(Last question I'm not sure has a good answer.)
This is part of my series on the future of work. In each post I take a specific research finding, prediction, or move — and ask what it means about the organizations we live in.
If you're a manager today and these questions resonate with you, I've got an entire book on this: The Little Book for New Managers.
Want to read the next one?
More changes coming to the future of work.
Pretty interesting stuff here, Lior
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