Picture being one of 175 people reporting to the same engineering manager. You've made a mistake that'll bite in a fortnight. Do you book time to tell them, or do you hope it sorts itself out?
At Block, that's a real question. After the company laid off 40% of its staff, some engineering managers were given as many as 175 direct reports, according to internal org charts reviewed by The Guardian. A former Square tech lead told the paper managers there typically had six to 12 before.
Block isn't alone. Coinbase says it no longer wants pure managers, and its managers will now have 15 or more reports each. Revelio Labs found US openings for middle manager roles had fallen 42% by the end of 2025 from their 2022 peak. If you work in HR or run a large team, this is probably already on your board's agenda.
The work managers did doesn't disappear
The pitch for flattening is speed. Fewer layers mean faster decisions, with AI shuffling information around instead of people. I get the appeal. Most of us have waited weeks for a simple yes.
But a lot of what good managers do never shows up on an org chart. They hear the bad news early, while it's still cheap to fix. They give a nervous junior permission to say "I think this is wrong" in a meeting full of senior people.
Strip that layer out and the bad news still exists. It just has nowhere to go. One Wharton professor quoted in the piece put it plainly: you lose a layer of kicking the tyres, so you move faster and break more things.
Speaking up gets harder at scale
This is where psychological safety stops being a soft topic. When your manager has seven reports, raising a problem means a quick chat with someone who knows you. When they have 175, it means interrupting someone who barely knows your name, about a problem they didn't ask about.
A Gartner analyst in the same piece made the knock-on point. When your manager doesn't get the support they need, you don't get it either. Stretch managers that thin and everyone below them feels it.
Most people won't. They'll mention it to a peer, or fix the symptom and leave the cause in place. None of that reaches the person who could actually act on it.
What the leader does in the room
So if you're flattening, or your executive team is talking about it, add two questions to the headcount maths. Who catches the problems now? And do people feel safe enough to hand them over?
What I'd put in place first
Name the catchers. If managers aren't going to hear the bad news, decide who will. A named person on each squad works, and so does a short weekly risk review. Write it down so everyone knows where problems go.
Make raising a problem cheap. A two-line note in a shared channel should be enough to flag something. If it takes a meeting request and a slide, it won't happen.
Reward the early warning. When someone flags a problem before it blows up, say so publicly. People watch what gets praised far more closely than what's in the values statement.
The standard you keep
Train the people who now carry the load. Senior individual contributors and team leads are suddenly doing the listening managers used to do. It's the same skill we cover in psychological safety training for managers. Most of them have never been taught how to respond when someone brings them bad news, and their first reaction decides whether the next person bothers.
Our psychological safety workshop works with intact teams on exactly that moment: how a problem gets raised, and what happens in the first thirty seconds after it is. The flatter you go, the more that moment matters, so it's worth practising before the restructure lands. If you're briefing a provider, start with what to ask before a psychological safety workshop.
