We cut middle management. AI is cutting entry-level work. Nobody planned it that way, but the result is the same: fewer people developing others, and fewer people being developed.
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A decade ago we removed middle management to move faster. It had created bureaucracy and not much visible value. So we cut. What we ignored at the time was what else went with it. The people who developed others. The people who guided early decisions. The people who helped new joiners understand how the place actually works. Now we are picking up the pieces, and decisions that should never reach us take up our day.
Meta called 2023 its “Year of Efficiency” and cut management layers. Amazon committed to a leaner ratio of managers to individual contributors. Both found that the work does not disappear when you remove the people doing it. It lands on senior leaders, on already-stretched teams, or it simply does not get done.
AI is compounding the problem. The routine work that used to teach new people how our organisations really function is disappearing. The first-year analyst, the graduate working through tasks nobody more experienced wanted: they were learning while they worked. That informal learning is gone, and most organisations have nothing to replace it. We are recruiting fewer people at the entry level and asking them to develop faster, in an environment that has removed the two things that used to make that possible: the work itself and the manager who helped them make sense of it.
Gallup found that the direct manager accounts for around 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Not the strategy. Not the culture programme. The person closest to the work, investing in the people doing it.
We make things worse by promoting on individual results and calling it leadership. The best salesperson is rarely the best sales director. The best lawyer does not automatically make the best practice leader. Individual excellence and building excellence in others are different skills, and often pull against each other. The result is brilliant specialists in leadership roles, poorly led teams, and a pipeline that is not producing coherent leaders. Fewer people coming in, and the wrong people responsible for developing them.
The people who develop others naturally are already in your organisation. They are the ones colleagues go to when something is stuck. They are the ones new joiners learn more from in a month than from any induction programme. They are probably not being measured on any of it, because we reward visible functional output and call everything else a distraction. Find them. Back them. Give them the space and the recognition to do what they are already doing, because they are good at it.
This is not the manager who ran the weekly update and sat in the middle of every decision. This one has a single purpose: developing people. Teaching, stretching, coaching. Creating the conditions in which the next generation of leaders actually becomes one.
Narrowly focused cost reduction yields visible results immediately. You arrive lean and efficient. But the organisations that will still be worth leading in ten years are the ones that invested, today, in the people who develop other people. That is not a cost. It is the only reliable way to build something that lasts.
