June 23, 2026 · 8 min read

The Layer They're Deleting Is Yours

This month GitLab cut about 350 people and flattened its management layers on the way to rebuilding itself for agent-scale work. Block went further, shedding roughly four thousand jobs, nearly half the company, with Jack Dorsey writing that smaller, flatter teams paired with AI are simply a new way to work. Gartner now says that by the end of this year, one in five organizations will eliminate more than half of their middle management.

Read that last number again. Not trim. Not reorganize. Eliminate more than half. If you are a middle manager, this is not a trend piece you forward to a colleague. This is a memo about your chair.

I am not going to soften it, because nobody who actually cares about you would. The flattening is real, it is accelerating, and the people pretending otherwise are the ones who will be most surprised. But the story does not end where the headlines stop, and the difference between the managers who survive this and the ones who do not comes down to a single question you can answer today.

Ask What You Are Actually For

Middle management was invented to move information. Push the decision down, pull the status up, keep the teams on either side of you in sync. For a century that was a full-time job, because information moved at the speed of meetings and email and the manager who attended both.

An agent does all three of those things now, continuously, at a scale no human calendar can match. It gathers the status, drafts the update, tracks the progress, and flags the misalignment before you have finished your coffee. So if your honest answer to “what do I do here” is some version of “I keep everyone informed and aligned,” you have just described the exact job your company is handing to software.

That is the uncomfortable part. Here is the part that should give you hope. The work that made you a manager is being automated. The work that makes you a leader is not, and most managers have spent so long buried in the first kind that they have never seriously invested in the second.

From Routing Information to Orchestrating Work

The managers coming out of this stronger are making one specific move. They are trading the job of relaying information for the job of orchestrating outcomes. Anyone can ask an agent for a status report. Far fewer people can look across five agents and a team of humans, decide what actually matters this quarter, catch the confident answer that is quietly wrong, and own the result when it ships.

That is judgment. That is context. That is the human relationship that makes a nervous engineer tell you the truth about a slipping deadline before it becomes a disaster. No agent on the market does any of that, and the companies cutting deepest are about to discover how much of it they quietly relied on their middle managers to provide.

The trouble is that nobody hands you a roadmap for that transition. You are expected to reinvent your own role, in real time, while the layoffs happen around you and your budget shrinks and your boss has no clearer answer than you do. That exact predicament, leading through the mess without a map, is the entire reason I wrote The AI Survival Guide for Middle Managers.

Stop Defending the Box. Defend the Value.

The instinct under threat is to protect your position. Guard the headcount, defend the meetings, prove you are busy. It is the worst thing you can do, because it ties your survival to the very activities the agent just made worthless. You end up fighting to keep a box on an org chart that the company has already decided to erase.

Defend your value instead, and be ruthless about the difference. Hand the status-gathering and the progress-tracking to the agents on purpose, loudly, before someone does it for you. Then spend the hours you just freed on the things that survive: developing your people, making the hard calls, owning outcomes nobody else will sign their name to. The manager who automates their own busywork and reinvests it in leadership does not get flattened. They get promoted, because they just became the person running the agents instead of competing with them.