The layer above you disappeared in a slide deck. The layer below you doubled. Nobody called it a promotion and nobody called it a demotion — the chart simply got shorter and wider, and you were told this would make everything faster. Six months on, you are working harder than you have ever worked, you are reaching fewer of your people than you ever have, and you have quietly concluded that the problem is you.
It is worth saying plainly at the outset: it is almost certainly not you. Something specific happened to the shape of leadership over the past two years, and most of the people living inside it have no language for it. They have only the feeling — a low, persistent sense of falling short that does not respond to working longer, and that no amount of competence seems to quiet.
That feeling has a structure. It is worth understanding, because the story you tell yourself about it determines whether you come out of this period with your sense of worth intact.
The Math Changed Without a Meeting
Gallup’s most recent research on span of control puts numbers to something you have probably felt without being able to name. The average number of people reporting directly to a manager in the United States rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025 — and that figure is roughly fifty percent higher than when Gallup first measured it in 2013.
The median, however, has held steady at around six. That gap between the median and the average tells you something important. This is not a gentle, even drift affecting everyone slightly. A minority of very large teams is dragging the average upward while most managers carry loads that look much as they always did. Thirteen percent of managers now oversee twenty-five people or more. If you are in that thirteen percent, you are not experiencing a general trend. You are absorbing a specific structural decision, and you are absorbing it largely alone.
The decision has a name now. Analysts call it the Great Flattening: the removal of management layers, accelerated by the argument that automated tooling can absorb the coordination, reporting and scheduling work those layers used to hold. Whatever its merits as organisational design — and there are real ones — it carries a psychological consequence that appears on no business case.
The flattening did not only remove a layer from the chart. It removed a layer from your identity.
Why Structural Strain Gets Filed as Personal Failure
Human beings are poor at attributing strain to systems. Given a shortfall and two explanations — the conditions changed, or I am not enough — the high achiever reaches with remarkable consistency for the second. There are three mechanisms worth naming, because each one operates below the level of conscious thought.
1. The role changed; the scorecard did not.
You are being evaluated by an internal standard built for a job that no longer exists. The version of you that felt competent knew everyone’s work, caught problems early, and could answer any question in the room because you had been close enough to the detail to have the answer. That was not vanity. It was a genuine, hard-won competence, and it was the evidence your self-worth ran on.
Double the surface area and that standard becomes arithmetically impossible. But standards do not update the way circumstances do. They lag, sometimes by years. So you go on measuring today’s version of yourself against a benchmark that today’s conditions make unreachable, and you register the inevitable gap not as a change in the terrain but as a decline in you.
2. Your evidence of competence got thinner.
Worth is not a belief; it is a case you are constantly, unconsciously building from evidence. For most leaders, the strongest evidence was never the results line. It was contact — the moment a person you had developed did something they could not have done a year ago, and you knew precisely what you had contributed to it.
Widen the span and that evidence thins without disappearing entirely, which is the cruellest version. You still lead. You still have moments. They simply arrive less often, and are divided across more people, so each one carries less weight. The case for your own competence gets quieter. And a quiet case, to a mind trained to look for shortfall, reads as no case at all.
3. There is no one left at your altitude.
The layer that was removed was also the layer that told you what normal looked like. Peers at the same level, doing the same job, under the same conditions, are how we calibrate. They are how you learn that the thing you are struggling with is difficult rather than that you are deficient.
Flattening removes that comparison class. Above you, people who see the aggregate and not the daily load. Below you, people for whom you must appear steady. The absence of a peer at your altitude does not just make the job lonelier. It removes the only reliable instrument you had for distinguishing a hard situation from a personal inadequacy.
The Forty Percent Line
There is one finding in the Gallup data that deserves to be read slowly, because it describes the specific trap most flattened leaders are caught in.
Ninety-seven percent of managers report carrying individual contributor responsibilities alongside leading others — work that falls outside their core leadership role. The median manager spends around forty percent of their time on it. Gallup’s analysis found that managers who stay below that forty percent threshold tend to maintain higher engagement than average regardless of how many people report to them. Managers who exceed it show lower engagement — and, critically, the effect worsens as their span of control widens.
Read those two variables together and the trap becomes visible. Flattening increases your span. It rarely decreases your hands-on workload; if anything it increases that too, because the person who used to absorb some of it is gone. You are pushed across the forty percent line and further out along the span axis at the same moment, and the research says those two pressures do not simply add. They compound.
But here is the part that matters for your sense of worth. The player-coach identity is not an accident of scheduling. For most leaders it is the whole architecture of how they came to feel valuable. You were promoted because you did the work superbly. Doing the work is where your competence lives and where you can feel it most directly. When the arithmetic finally makes it impossible to do both the work and the people well, you are not merely over capacity. You are being asked to give up the specific activity from which you have always drawn your evidence of being good at this.
That is why so many leaders in flattened organisations do not delegate the hands-on work even when they intellectually know they should. Delegating it does not feel like efficiency. It feels like handing away the proof.
What the Research Says Span Actually Costs
It would be neat to conclude that a wider span simply damages leaders, but the evidence is more interesting and considerably more useful than that.
A four-year study of first-line managers in a Swedish healthcare organisation, published in 2025 by Svanström, Skytt, Lindberg and Lindberg, tracked expanded span of control against management performance, work-related stress and job satisfaction from 2020 through 2023. Expanded span did have a negative relationship with job satisfaction — but not consistently, and not in every year measured. It was not the stable villain you might expect.
What was consistent across the four years were two other things. High demands and strained relationships reliably pulled job satisfaction down. And control and support reliably pushed it back up.
In other words: span is not destiny. Span without control and support is. Headcount is the variable everyone points at because it is the one sitting in the spreadsheet, but the research suggests it is not the variable doing most of the damage. The damage is done by a load you cannot shape, in conditions where nobody is holding you.
This ought to be some relief, and it is also a challenge. It means your situation is not an immutable fact of the new structure. It means there are two specific levers — how much control you have over the work, and how much support surrounds you — that materially change the outcome, and neither of them requires anyone to give you your old headcount back.
Reclaiming the Scorecard
The goal here is not resilience in the sense of tolerating more. It is accuracy: judging yourself against the job you actually hold rather than the one you used to hold.
1. Audit the forty percent before you audit yourself.
Spend two weeks recording, honestly, what proportion of your time goes to individual contributor work. Not what you intend. What happens. If the number is well above forty percent while your span has widened, you have located a structural fact, and structural facts are not character evidence. They are the first thing to put in front of your own leadership — not as a complaint, but as a capacity model. Leaders who bring numbers to this conversation are heard very differently from leaders who bring strain.
2. Rewrite what counts as the work.
If your evidence of worth is built on proximity to the detail, it will keep failing you at this span. It has to be rebuilt on something that scales. Gallup’s research points to an unusually concrete candidate: providing meaningful feedback to each person at least once a week nearly triples the proportion of employees who are engaged. Yet among roughly fifteen thousand employees surveyed, only sixteen percent said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful. These conversations do not need to be long — fifteen to thirty minutes, done consistently, is enough.
That is a definition of your job that survives a doubled team. It is also, for most leaders, far harder than doing the work themselves, which is precisely why it deserves to count as competence.
3. Name your two real variables.
Control and support are the levers the evidence says matter, so treat them as explicit objects of negotiation rather than things you hope arrive. Control means having a say in what enters your queue and in what order. Support means at least one relationship — a peer at your level in another function, a mentor outside the organisation, a professional counterpart — where you can describe the actual load without managing anyone’s impression of you. If flattening removed your peer layer, the answer is not to endure its absence. It is to rebuild it deliberately, outside the chart if necessary.
4. Separate the verdict from the variance.
Ask of any given bad week: what would have to be true for this to be about conditions rather than character? Then check whether those things are in fact true. Wider span, unchanged hands-on load, no peer at your altitude, no reduction in expectations. If most of the list is true, the honest conclusion is available and it is not the one your inner critic reached for first. This is not self-exoneration. It is a refusal to accept an unexamined verdict.
The Reframe
The thing that is most disorienting about this particular moment is that nothing announced itself. There was no meeting in which your role was redefined, no document explaining that the basis on which you had measured your own value for fifteen years was now obsolete. The chart changed, the language stayed the same, and you were left to discover the mismatch privately, one shortfall at a time.
Which means the work in front of you is not to become adequate to an impossible standard. It is to notice that the standard was quietly retired, and to decide consciously what replaces it — before exhaustion decides for you.
The leaders who come through flattening with their sense of worth intact are rarely the ones who absorbed the most. They are the ones who stopped reading an organisational decision as a personal verdict, and who rebuilt their evidence of competence on something that could survive the new arithmetic. That is not a smaller version of leadership. Under these conditions, it is the harder one.
Continue Reading
- Decision Fatigue: The Quiet Engine Behind Executive Burnout — what a doubled span does to the resource you spend all day drawing down.
- The Weight of Responsibility: An Executive’s Inner Life — on carrying more people than anyone can see you carrying.
- Quiet Cracking: The Executive Burnout Nobody Names — how this kind of strain presents before it presents as burnout.
Further Reading
- Leadership on the Line by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky — on the difference between technical problems and adaptive ones, and why treating the second as the first exhausts leaders.
- The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo — a clear account of what a manager’s work actually consists of once it stops being the work itself.
- Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski — on why completing the stress response is a separate task from removing the stressor.
Where Your Worth Is Anchored
If this article described your last six months more precisely than you were comfortable with, the useful next question is not how to cope with the load. It is what your sense of worth is currently resting on, and whether that foundation can survive the shape your role has taken. The Executive Identity Profile is a structured assessment that maps exactly that — where your self-worth is anchored, and which anchors are under strain right now.
If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.
References
- Harter, J. (2026). Span of Control: What’s the Optimal Team Size for Managers? Gallup, Workplace. Published 13 January 2026. Manager analysis based on Gallup Panel data collected 2013–2025; team meta-analysis covering 92,252 teams across 104 organisations, 26 industries and 46 countries.
- Svanström, J., Skytt, B., Lindberg, M., & Lindberg, M. (2025). Expanded span of control, leadership and management performance, work-related stress, and job satisfaction among first-line managers: A repeated cross-sectional study. Work. DOI: 10.1177/10519815251326470. https://doi.org/10.1177/10519815251326470
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment by Major Occupational Group. Cited in Harter (2026) for the approximate ratio of one manager per 11.5 employees.