Your old role isn’t coming back

Middle managers accounted for nearly a third of all layoffs in 2023, up from around 20% five years earlier. In 2024, Gartner predicted that through 2026, 20% of organizations would be using AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of their middle management positions. And that prediction is being borne out by the data. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that manager head count fell by 6.1% between May 2022 and May 2025, while in Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025 survey, “41%...