The Manager is Missing

Exploring the decline of middle management, the automation of coordination, and the rise of modular leadership in the modern workplace—and what it means for organisations.

In the late 20th century, the middle manager was a fixture of corporate life. They were not glamorous. They did not make headlines. They were, however, indispensable.

In most organisations, they served as the mesh that held everything together: translating executive strategy into concrete steps, interpreting ambiguous signals from the top, managing the emotional climate of teams, and—when necessary—shielding employees from the caprice of senior leadership.

Their work was rarely visible to anyone outside their immediate teams. But without them, the corporate structure was brittle. The middle manager embodied institutional memory. They were a repository of unwritten rules, informal networks, and practical wisdom about “how things actually work here.”

That role began to erode long before remote work became the default. Over two decades, technology chipped away at the functions managers once performed. Performance dashboards replaced hallway updates. Automated systems sent reminders and escalations. Email replaced much of the day-to-day check-in. Then came the pandemic, and with it, a near-universal experiment in remote-first work.

Suddenly, the physical cues and routines managers relied on were gone. Communication was reduced to text windows and scheduled video calls. Work became harder to observe, harder to contextualise, and harder to mediate.

At the same time, cost pressures mounted. In slow-growth sectors, middle management salaries became a tempting expense to cut. In 2023, major employers—across industries from tech to manufacturing—began eliminating these roles at scale.

Executives increasingly saw middle managers not as enablers but as overhead.

Yet the functions they performed did not disappear. Instead, they were redistributed—into software, into team rituals, into ad hoc leadership by whoever had the time or will to step in.

This is the new reality: the traditional manager is missing, but the need for management has not gone away.

In this issue of Brewed for Work, we examine the disappearance of the traditional middle manager and the rise of modular leadership structures. We explore why this shift has happened, what technology has replaced, and what it has left exposed. And we look at the organisational consequences of distributing management tasks across tools, peers, and algorithms—where accountability blurs but the work of leadership remains essential.

Today’s Issue at a Glance:

• The Middle Manager: Backbone or Bottleneck?

• Resistance and Redefinition

• Modular Leadership and Distributed Authority

• The Emotional Infrastructure Gap

So grab your favorite mug, and let's get brewing!

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The middle manager’s decline is not a sudden event. It is the outcome of a twenty-year structural shift accelerated by technology, globalisation, and shifting organisational priorities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, large companies operated with multiple management layers. Decisions travelled down a chain of command. Information travelled back up. Managers mediated between strategy and execution, often translating abstract goals into concrete plans.

That translation role was valuable but also costly. Middle managers occupied positions with higher salaries than frontline employees but without the direct profit-generating visibility of executives. As competitive pressures grew, companies began questioning whether every layer was necessary.

» Technological advances provided alternatives.

Enterprise software took over status tracking, resource allocation, and scheduling. Tools like email, instant messaging, and later project management platforms, reduced the dependency on a single human point of coordination. By the early 2010s, some of the functions that once required a manager were already automated or distributed among team members.

» Remote work intensified this change.

Without co-location, the visibility that allowed managers to intervene early disappeared. Performance and progress became quantified through metrics. A manager’s intuition about team morale or individual struggles became harder to maintain through sporadic video calls. For many executives, the loss of this “human layer” was outweighed by the cost savings of eliminating positions.

This is not only a corporate budgeting story. It is also a cultural one.

Younger workers are less likely to see management as an aspirational career goal. In many organisations, the manager role has shifted from a marker of growth to a position characterised by more meetings, more emotional labour, and less direct impact. The authority once associated with the title has diminished, while accountability has intensified.

And yet, the need for coordination, alignment, and translation of strategy has not disappeared. Instead, it has migrated—into workflow tools, into distributed leadership models, and into informal, often invisible, emotional work performed by peers. This modularisation of management changes not only how organisations function but how leadership itself is understood.

The disappearance of the middle manager is not the end of management. It is the start of a different, more fragmented, and in some ways more demanding era of leadership.

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