There is an old category of workplace jokes that asks how many people it takes to change a light bulb. In Strategic Workforce Planning terms, the punchline often involves a committee and a budget question.
The jokes work because we recognize a little bit of organizational truth in them.
So perhaps executives should ask a more useful version of the question:
How many managers does it take to make a decision?
In some organizations, the answer is one. Strategic Workforce Planning guides how decisions travel from employee to supervisor, then to manager, director, and perhaps vice president.
Everyone involved may be competent. Every layer may have made sense when it was created. Yet somewhere along the way, management can gradually shift from helping people accomplish work to becoming part of the route the work must travel.
That distinction deserves more attention, especially as organizations reconsider management layers, spans of control, and the cost of increasingly complicated structures.
The important question isn't simply whether your organization has too many managers.
It's whether you know what all that management is for.
Management Is Not the Problem
It's easy to turn conversations about organizational layers into criticism of middle managers. I think that's a mistake.
Good managers create enormous value. They develop people, translate strategy into execution, solve problems, coordinate work, allocate resources, manage risk, provide context, remove barriers, and make decisions that keep the organization moving.
They also do something that's increasingly important in complicated organizations: they help people make sense of competing demands.
The problem isn't management.
The problem is management without clarity about its purpose.
Organizations frequently add managers for perfectly reasonable reasons. A team grows. A function becomes more complicated. Someone needs additional oversight. An executive has too many direct reports. A new business unit is created. The organization wants to provide a career path for a high performer.
One layer becomes two. Two become three. Eventually, the structure itself begins determining how work moves.
That's when it becomes worth asking whether each management layer is adding leadership or simply adding another stop along the way.
Follow a Decision Through Your Organization
An organizational chart can tell you who reports to whom. It doesn't necessarily tell you how the organization actually works.
For that, follow a decision.
Pick something relatively ordinary—not a major acquisition or a decision that appropriately belongs with the board. Follow a routine business decision from the moment someone recognizes that it needs to be made until someone finally has the authority to say yes or no.
You may discover that the person closest to the issue understands the problem perfectly well but doesn't have authority to act. Their manager agrees with the recommendation but also lacks authority. The next manager wants additional information before forwarding it. Another leader asks whether Finance has reviewed it. Someone else wants Legal involved because Legal was involved the last time something vaguely similar happened.
Eventually, a decision that could have taken an afternoon takes three weeks.
The organization may describe this as governance.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it's simply unclear decision authority wearing a very respectable outfit.
Managers Can Become Permission Stations
This is where management structure and decision-making become intertwined.
When employees aren't clear about what they can decide, they escalate. When managers aren't clear about their authority, they escalate too. When an organization has been punished by a bad decision in the past, it often responds by adding another approval.
Over time, management layers can become a series of permission stations through which work must pass.
The interesting thing is that nobody necessarily designed the organization that way.
It evolved.
A leader sought visibility, so approval was added as part of Strategic Workforce Planning. A mistake happened, so another review became mandatory. A manager didn't trust a team, so more decisions moved upward. Someone wanted consistency across departments, so a centralized sign-off was introduced.
Each change may have solved an immediate problem.
Collectively, however, they can create an organization where people have responsibility for results without corresponding authority to produce them.
That's an expensive way to operate.
Sometimes We Add Managers to Solve Problems That Aren't Management Problems
Organizations don't always need another manager when coordination becomes difficult.
Sometimes they need clearer roles.
Or a better process.
Or better information.
Or a system that actually talks to another system.
Or a decision about who owns what.
When those things are missing, managers often become the workaround.
They attend meetings to connect departments that don't communicate well. They manually reconcile information because systems aren't integrated. They mediate recurring conflicts caused by unclear accountability. They monitor work because performance expectations aren't clear.
The manager becomes organizational glue.
Some glue is necessary. Every organization needs people who connect work across boundaries.
But if management is compensating for structural confusion, adding another manager can make the organization feel more controlled without actually solving the underlying problem.
The better question might be: What problem are we expecting this management role to solve?
If the answer is unclear, the position itself deserves another look.
The Org Chart Doesn't Show Authority
Two organizations can have almost identical organizational charts and operate very differently.
In one, managers have meaningful authority. They understand which decisions belong to them, which belong to their teams, and which truly require executive involvement. Employees know where their boundaries are and can act confidently inside them.
In the other organization, almost everything moves upward.
The boxes look the same.
The operating experience is completely different.
This is why simply removing layers doesn't necessarily create a faster organization. If you eliminate a management position but leave decision rights unchanged, the decisions don't disappear. They simply pile up on someone else's desk.
That person may now have twice as many direct reports and three times as many approvals waiting in their inbox.
Congratulations. The organization is flatter.
It isn't necessarily better.
Flattening Can Create Its Own Problems
There is understandable enthusiasm right now for flatter organizations. Fewer layers can reduce cost, bring senior leaders closer to the work, and eliminate unnecessary hand-offs.
But span of control shouldn't become another management fashion where one number is declared ideal and applied everywhere.
A manager overseeing experienced professionals performing relatively independent work may successfully lead a larger team. A manager responsible for employees who require substantial coaching, complex coordination, or close operational oversight may not.
The nature of the work matters.
So does the purpose of the manager.
If you broaden spans of control while expecting managers to continue approving every decision, attending every meeting, solving every problem, completing substantial individual work, and coaching every employee, something eventually gives.
Usually it's the activity that's hardest to see on a spreadsheet.
Coaching gets postponed. Development conversations become shorter. Strategic thinking gets squeezed out. Managers become reactive because their days are consumed by transactions.
The organization may save money on management positions while quietly reducing the amount of actual management taking place.
Look at Where Decisions Are Waiting
One of the most revealing things executives can examine isn't how many managers they have.
It's where decisions wait.
Where do employees routinely say, “We're waiting for approval”?
Where do projects stall because the person with authority isn't available?
Where are managers spending significant amounts of time approving decisions that competent employees could make themselves?
Where does a relatively small financial decision require an executive signature?
Where are people repeatedly escalating issues because nobody is quite sure who owns the decision?
Those waiting points tell you something important about organizational design.
They show where authority and work may no longer be aligned.
And they may reveal that what looks like a staffing problem, productivity problem, or management problem is actually a decision-design problem.
Risk Has a Role Here
Of course, not every decision should be pushed downward.
Organizations operate with real financial, legal, safety, reputational, and regulatory risks. Some decisions require specialized expertise. Others appropriately require executive or board oversight.
The goal isn't maximum autonomy.
It's appropriate autonomy.
A useful organization distinguishes between decisions that require control and decisions that have simply accumulated control.
Those aren't the same thing.
If a front-line employee can resolve a customer problem within clearly defined parameters, does a manager need to approve it? If a department head has an approved budget, does every expenditure require another executive's signature? If a manager has responsibility for performance, what authority do they actually have to address it?
Sometimes the answer will be that additional oversight is warranted.
But “because that's our process” shouldn't automatically end the conversation.
Trust Shows Up in Structure
Decision authority also reveals something organizations don't always like to discuss openly: trust.
Leaders may say they want empowered employees while maintaining systems that require employees to ask permission constantly.
They may say managers are accountable for results while reserving important decisions for executives.
They may encourage innovation while requiring so many approvals that trying something new becomes exhausting.
Employees notice the contradiction.
If we tell people they own an outcome but don't allow them to make reasonable decisions about how to achieve it, they don't truly own the outcome.
They own the responsibility.
Someone else owns the authority.
That's not empowerment. It's accountability with one hand tied behind your back.
AI Makes This Even More Interesting
As AI takes on more administrative and analytical work, organizations will inevitably revisit what managers do.
That's a useful conversation, but I hope it doesn't become simply, “AI allows one manager to supervise more people.”
Perhaps it does.
But AI may also allow employees to operate with greater independence. Information that once had to travel upward for interpretation may be available directly to the person doing the work. Routine coordination may become easier. Managers may spend less time gathering information and more time developing people, resolving ambiguity, and exercising judgment.
That could fundamentally change the management role.
The opportunity isn't merely to remove managers.
It's to remove management work that doesn't require a manager.
Those are very different objectives.
What Would Break If a Layer Disappeared?
Here's a question worth considering when examining organizational structure.
If a particular management layer disappeared tomorrow, what would stop working?
Not who would inherit the direct reports. That's the obvious question.
What work would stop happening?
Would employees lose valuable coaching? Would cross-functional coordination break down? Would important risks go unmanaged? Would customers suffer? Would nobody translate strategy into operational priorities?
If so, you've identified valuable management work that needs to exist somewhere.
But perhaps the answer is different.
Maybe what disappears is a layer of approvals. Maybe information no longer needs to be repackaged before moving upward. Perhaps two recurring meetings disappear. Maybe decisions move closer to the people who actually understand them.
That tells you something too.
The objective shouldn't be to prove a manager is unnecessary.
It should be to understand what value the layer creates.
Maybe the Question Isn't How Many Managers You Need
Executives naturally want benchmarks. What's the right span of control? How many layers should exist between the CEO and the front-line? How many managers should an organization of our size have?
Benchmarks can be useful.
But organizations aren't built from identical work.
A hospital, software company, manufacturer, professional services firm, retailer, and nonprofit may need very different structures. Even functions within the same organization may require different management models.
So perhaps the more useful question isn't, “How many managers should we have?”
It's, “What management does our work require?”
Where is leadership genuinely needed? Where is coaching valuable? Where does complexity require coordination? Where does risk require oversight? Where should decisions sit? Where has management become a substitute for clearer processes, better systems, or more explicit authority?
Answer those questions first.
Then design the structure.
Before You Remove a Box, Understand Why It's There
Organizations are going to continue flattening structures. Some will do it because their organizations genuinely need redesign. Others will do it because management positions are expensive and reducing them produces immediate savings.
Both can be legitimate reasons.
But removing boxes from an organizational chart is easy.
Redesigning how decisions get made is harder.
If leaders don't address decision authority, accountability, management workload, information flow, and the actual purpose of management, today's flatter organization can eventually rebuild the same complexity in a different form.
A few years from now, new layers appear because managers are overwhelmed. Coordinators get added because nobody knows who owns cross-functional work. Senior leaders become bottlenecks because too many decisions moved upward.
And the cycle begins again.
So before asking how many managers your organization can eliminate, try a different question.
How many managers does it currently take to make a decision—and why?
The answer may tell you far more about your organization than the org chart ever will.
