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- Issue 61
Issue 61
FYI: Layoffs of approx. 65,400 people were announced since Monday
Chris Hagood
October 30, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
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Table of Contents
Opening Salvo
Across industries, middle managers are being laid off in record numbers. The cuts are often described as “flattening the organization” or “streamlining operations.” Especially since the emergence and deployment of AI is often lobbed as the justification. In practice, these moves are less about efficiency and more about misunderstanding what middle management actually does.
Middle managers connect strategy to execution. They translate decisions, manage resources, and maintain alignment when priorities shift. What organizations are truly eliminating is the decision infrastructure that ensures coordination and clarity. Without that system, strategy fragments and operational risk increases.
We’ve seen this pattern unfold repeatedly. Companies often remove a layer of leadership, distribute the same workload to fewer people, and expect operations to move faster. The result is almost always the opposite. The short-term savings are followed by long-term decline in coordination, culture, and accountability.
Practical Personas (with a tinge of hyperbole)
The Layer Eliminator: Removes middle managers to cut costs and calls it “agility.” Workloads spread unevenly, decisions slow, and employees lose guidance.
The Title Preserver: Keeps the headcount but dilutes the role. Managers are burdened with administrative work and lose the capacity to coach or lead.
The Structural Rebuilder: Redefines management as a coordination system. They clarify decision rights, rebuild spans of control, and design roles that add value between strategy and execution.
Ask Yourself:
What specific problem are you solving by removing middle managers?
How will decisions be made when the people who previously connected teams are gone?
Have you measured the cost of lost coordination and employee disengagement?
Flattening often removes the very people who keep the system functioning, creating more complexity instead of speed.
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Did You See This?
Amazon Commits $2.5 Billion to Workforce Upskilling
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
The Middle Management Reckoning
Middle management is often viewed as a layer of bureaucracy. In reality, it is an operating system. Middle leaders manage trade-offs, translate strategy, and ensure alignment across functions. When organizations remove this layer without redesigning workflows, they replace structure with confusion.
Why It Matters:
Eliminating middle managers reduces communication flow between strategy and execution
Overloaded senior leaders spend more time on coordination than on strategy
Frontline teams lose access to coaching and development support
Organizational trust declines when direction becomes inconsistent
What to Change and How:
Diagnose before cutting: Identify inefficiencies in structure, not just cost centers
Redefine manager roles: Focus on decision-making, alignment, and coaching
Adjust spans of control: Create manageable scopes to sustain quality leadership
Build new operating rhythms: Ensure accountability and communication do not collapse when layers shift
The goal is stronger management capacity, supported by leaders who enable clarity, capability, and connection across the organization. When efficiency is pursued without alignment, organizations create the conditions for exhaustion instead of progress.
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance consultancy that helps organizations execute strategy by fixing misalignment in people, systems, and structure.
We work with leadership teams that want to turn strategic intent into measurable execution, by aligning operating rhythms, decision accountability, and leadership capacity with the metrics that matter most.
How We Help:
Expose Friction: Surface the hidden work, duplicate effort, and slow decision paths that quietly stall execution.
Realign Operating Rhythms: Redesign meeting and decision cadences so priorities move faster and accountability sticks.
Build Leadership Capacity: Strengthen how leaders make, communicate, and cascade decisions across teams.
Clarify Ownership: Define decision accountability to reduce noise, sharpen focus, and eliminate rework.
Engineer Performance Systems: Connect performance metrics to real outcomes, not paperwork.
Reinforce Organizational Health: Align people, systems, and structure so performance scales without burnout.
If your organization, or a partner organization, needs to move strategy from “planned” to “proven,” let’s talk.
Share this newsletter with leaders who feel the drag of misalignment, or visit astutedge.com to see how we help organizations execute faster, cleaner, and with greater impact.
