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“How many managers to have — what are the pros and cons of managers?” The question was posed to Mark Zuckerberg nearly two years ago during an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman.
At the time, the Meta CEO — still sporting his shorter “Caesar” haircut — had kicked off the “Great Flattening” trend, culling middle managers amid his “year of efficiency” as a correction to over-hiring during the pandemic.
But as companies beyond Big Tech, the latest being Tinder owner Match Group, pare back managerial roles, Zuckerberg’s answer to the podcaster’s question in June 2023 remains relevant today — and helps explain why CEOs continue to thin out management ranks.
The Facebook founder began by acknowledging that managers are an important component of a company like Meta.
“I believe a lot in management,” he said. “I think there are some people who think that it doesn’t matter as much, but look, we have a lot of younger people at the company, for them this is their first job and people need to grow and learn in their career.”
Zuckerberg said there was “a mathematical way” he thought about the ratio of employees to managers and making cuts.
Before Meta’s layoffs, Zuckerberg said he had asked about the average number of direct reports each manager had at the company and learned it was around three to four. He felt it should be more like seven to eight. The lower numbers made sense at the time, Zuckerberg said, as Meta was hiring a ton and helping newcomers ramp up.
“So, in a world where we’re not adding so many people as quickly, is it as valuable to have a lot of managers who have extra capacity waiting for new people? No, right?” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said he decided to “defragment the organization,” thinning out the ranks of middle management, which “decreases the latency on information going up and down the chain and I think empowers people more.”
It all added up to a leaner organization that he felt could move faster in both decision-making and execution.
Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg mentioned that the cuts came at a time of uncertainty in the world. As companies navigate geopolitical tensions and Trump’s trade war, Zuckerberg’s words in 2023 likely ring true to many CEOs today.
“I just feel the external world is quite volatile right now,” Zuckerberg said in the interview. “And I wanted to make sure that we had a stable position.”
Middle managers have increasingly found a target on their backs in recent years. Massive companies followed Meta’s lead over the last year, with Amazon and Google moving to flatten their org charts amid a renewed focus on greater efficiency.
Their CEOs have similarly voiced their reasons for why.
At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy said in September that the company would increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of March.
“Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today,” he said at the time. Or, in short, as he told employees in a November all-hands, “I hate bureaucracy.”
Google is cutting manager, director, and vice president roles by 10%, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in December.
Pichai said Google had made changes designed to simplify the company and boost its efficiency, two employees who heard the CEO’s comments previously told BI. In September 2022, he’d said he wanted Google to be 20% more efficient; months later, the company saw a historic round of layoffs that eliminated 12,000 jobs.
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai told staff in an email about those layoffs. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Salesforce in 2023 slashed some layers of management and turned some managers into individual contributors, with the goal of reducing the “spans” and “layers of control” across the company, BI previously reported. Earlier that year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had announced layoffs of 10% of the workforce as part of a cost-cutting restructuring plan. In his memo to staff, he cited pandemic overhiring and a “challenging” economic environment as reasons for the cuts.
Middle managers made up nearly one-third of layoffs among white-collar workers in 2023, according to a data analysis by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg.
Match Group, the parent company of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, announced this week a 13% reduction in its workforce, affecting one in five managers.
Beyond tech, the focus on flattening has extended to behemoths of other industries.
Citi in 2023 announced it was paring back its layers of management from 13 to eight; the company later announced cuts affecting 1,500 managerial roles. At the start of 2024, UPS said it was laying off 12,000 of its 85,000 managers.
Some workplace experts have cautioned that the so-called “Great Flattening” targeting middle managers could hurt workforces, as middle managers often carry out vital responsibilities like executing on upper management’s goals and boosting employees’ morale and performance.
The trend is continuing as companies decide that restructuring to decrease the number of managers is the right move to appease investors who are zeroed in on efficiency, especially after the pandemic hiring boom in tech.
Or, as Zuckerberg previously described it:
“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.”
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