TheCareerGrid

Why do restructures always seem to hit the same layer?

Over the past year, one pattern keeps repeating across industries. Organisations undergoing organisational restructures announcing “flattened structures,” “simplified layers,” or “agility driven restructures.”

And almost every time, the same group takes the hit. Middle Managers.

Recent middle management layoffs announcements across tech, consulting, professional services, and financial services show that middle management roles are being reduced or removed entirely. It’s being framed as modernisation. Reasons being efficiency and for faster decision making.

But the reality is different. Its less transformation strategy and more cost cutting with a narrative.

When organisations remove middle managers, you know the work doesn’t just *poof* and disappear.

Performance management still needs to happen, stakeholders still need alignment and teams still need support, prioritisation, and translation between strategy and execution.

What actually happens when these layoffs occur is that senior leaders inherit the operations detail that they’ve never had time for. Other employees absorb leadership responsibilities without authority or pay increases, and decision making actually becomes slower, not faster.

In my opinion, the initial problem is that many organisations never clearly define the value of middle manager roles. So middle managers become overloaded with admin work instead of focusing on things like capability uplift, leadership and execution, which overtime, labels them as non essential and then the cycle just continues. This is why you hear an organisation has laid off 200 people and then you see 200 adverts of ‘similar roles’ up months later.

Yet another sign of leadership failure disguised as efficiency.

So why do I care about this?

Because I’ve spent the last few years coaching middle managers and mid career professionals to stay visible in their organisations and across their industries and to keep their career positioning and personal branding sharp.

Why?

Because in a volatile market, invisibility is DANGEROUS.

If you don’t position yourself properly, you can end up in the worst possible career zone. Not senior enough to be seen as strategic, and not junior enough to be considered high potential talent. That’s where people start to stagnate or struggle to move.

If you’re in a middle management role right now, this isn’t a signal to panic. It’s a sign to look at your positioning and visibility.

Because being reliable, loyal, or “low maintenance” is no longer protection. Your value can’t be implied anymore, it needs to be explicit.

That means being clear about what you actually deliver. What breaks when you’re removed. What stability, capability, and momentum you create. It means moving beyond “I manage a team” and into outcomes leaders care about. Capability uplift, risk reduction, execution speed, stability during change.

Middle management isn’t disappearing because it isn’t needed. It’s disappearing because too many organisations, and too many professionals, never clearly explained why it mattered.

And in a market obsessed with efficiency, anything that can’t articulate its value becomes expendable.

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