Two years ago she managed five people, and she could have told you without checking a note which of them was already interviewing somewhere else and which was a month from leaving out of plain boredom. Now she manages fifteen. The reorganization arrived without a speech. A layer above her was removed, her former peers were folded into her reporting line, and the chart got shorter by a row. What went first was the standing one-on-one. She still keeps them on the calendar, though she moved them to every other week, and then to whenever there is a fire, which lately is most weeks.

Her company would not describe any of this as a decision to coach people less. No leader signs off on that. The words used in the room were speed and cost, and both were real. What nobody priced was the thing she used to do in the fifteen minutes after a one-on-one ran long, the noticing that does not show up on any plan.

The average moved and the median did not

Gallup has tracked how many people report to the typical manager since 2013, and the average climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, a rise of close to fifty percent since Gallup first measured in 2013.1 Read that line alone and you picture every manager in the country suddenly holding a bigger team. The median says otherwise. It has held at roughly five to six people the entire time.1 A minority of very large teams is pulling the average up while most managers still lead a handful.

The typical manager never got a bigger team. A minority absorbed every layer that was removed, and the average is precisely what hides which ones.

I wrote in July about manager engagement falling as spans widened, and skimmed quickly this looks like the same story. It is closer to the opposite. That piece read the pressure as landing broadly. This number says it did not land broadly at all. It concentrated, and the average is what conceals where.

About one in five managers now carry between ten and twenty-four direct reports, and thirteen percent oversee twenty-five or more.1 Those are the people who absorbed the layers that got cut. They are also, in most of these companies, the ones being handed a mandate to grow talent and build the next line of leaders, at exactly the team size where knowing anyone well becomes a scheduling problem.

Ask one of these managers how it is going and the answer tends to rhyme. Things are fine, the team ships. What they can no longer tell you with any confidence is who on the team has gone flat and who has outgrown the role without once saying so out loud. Those were things a manager of five simply knew, the way you register the mood of a small household. At fifteen, the same knowledge becomes a report that someone in a people-analytics function has to run for you.

Nobody signs off on less coaching

When Amazon set out to flatten in the fall of 2024, Andy Jassy put a number on it. His September memo directed the company to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least fifteen percent by the end of the first quarter of 2025, and he framed the goal as removing layers so decisions could move faster.2 Read that logic and notice what is absent from it. Coaching does not appear anywhere in it, and neither does the work of developing a person. The case for flattening gets made in the language of throughput, and the cost of it lands in a place the org chart does not draw.

The combination Gallup calls uncommon

Here is the part the throughput case misses. Gallup's data does not say that bigger teams simply fail. It says manager talent trumps span of control outright, and that managers who spend a large share of their own week on individual-contributor work show lower engagement, worsening as the team grows.1 Gallup adds a detail that is easy to skim past: those heavy-doer managers usually lead smaller teams.1 Flattening manufactures the pairing Gallup treats as the exception. She did not stop being a doer when the layer above her vanished. She kept her delivery work and inherited ten more people on top of it. Coaching is the one task on her list with no deadline attached, so it loses, every week, to the tasks that have one. Fifteen direct reports means you know three of them genuinely well and run the other twelve by exception, which is another way of saying you have stopped developing them.

What gets lost is not visible for a while, which is why it is easy to keep cutting. A person moved from doing what they are told toward owning an outcome does not get there on their own. Someone has to notice the moment they are ready for more, hand it over, and stay close enough to catch the fall if it comes. That noticing is slow and it does not scale by adding rows to a spreadsheet. Strip it out and you still get compliance, which photographs well on a dashboard and evaporates the day the manager stops standing over it.

So the question for anyone who has flattened a structure in the last two years is not whether decisions got faster. Some of them did. The question is what you assumed the surviving managers would stop doing to make room, and whether you ever said that part out loud. If the answer is that they would simply coach the same way across three times the people, that was never a plan. It was a hope with a headcount attached.