Flatter structures only help if manager work is redesigned with them

Strategy& highlights hourglass organizations with too many layers and narrow spans of control, and links that shape to bottlenecks and weaker innovation. It also cites a Fortune 100 company that saved $200 million through a spans and layers program. That is enough to justify a serious look at structure. It is not enough to assume the work will run better once layers come out.

The work does not disappear with the layer. Decisions still need to be made. Approvals still need to move. People still need coaching, and exceptions still need handling. If those demands stay in place, a flatter structure can simply push more of them onto fewer managers. The chart looks cleaner while the daily load stays messy.

That is the point I would test before approving a learning response. I would want to know which manager tasks are actually being removed, which decisions are moving closer to the work, and where teams can act without another meeting or escalation. If those answers are vague, the problem is not a manager capability gap yet. It is a work design problem. Training managers to cope with the old load in a thinner structure is a larger intervention than the situation may require, and it can miss the real constraint.

Deloitte makes a related point in a different context. Its view is that scaling AI requires changes to decision rights, funding mechanisms and governance. The useful carryover here is narrower. A structural change usually fails first at the level of authority and workflow, not the org chart. If managers still have the same approvals to chase and the same decisions to carry, wider spans mostly concentrate coordination work.

The evidence base here is still bounded. Strategy& offers a strong directional case and one substantial example, but it does not show that savings, responsiveness and innovation gains will hold across sectors or over time. Betterworks reports that organizations with effective managers rate them as effective 94 percent of the time, compared with 59 percent in less effective organizations. That is useful context on manager quality. It does not show that flatter structures create better managers.

For a CHRO, the practical test is whether the redesign removes manager work or just redistributes it. I would look first at approvals and exception handling, because that is where extra layers often leave the most residue. If those paths are still unclear, asking L&D to lead the fix is early. Define what managers still own, what teams can decide without them, and what support sits in the workflow. Without that, fewer layers can look efficient on paper while decisions slow down and time to proficiency stretches for everyone else.