What Does the "Great Flattening" Mean for You?
Welcome to the Ageless Careers Insider Weekly where we talk through the issues that affect executives and workers in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond.
What do Meta, Amazon, Citigroup, Bayer, Intel, Google, Uber, and Coinbase all have in common?
They're all companies who have started the "Great Flattening" process: cutting layers of middle management based on the belief that "flatter is faster" (Mark Zuckerberg).
You may be going through the same process at your company: according to Gallup, the average number of people reporting to managers is up nearly 50% since 2013 and reached 12.1 in 2025. Korn Ferry's research shows that 41% of employees said that their organization has already reduced the number of management layers.
The question that many people are asking is whether or not these reorganizations are actually helping productivity - the results so far are mixed. At Citi, financial performance improved when the company moved from 13 to 8 management layers, while at Meta, financials did improve after the workforce was cut by 20%+ but morale dropped considerably during the next round of layoffs.
Those of us who have been working for 20+ years know that reorganizations are just part of normal operations. What feels different about this round is the AI disruption and whether AI will replace certain roles and functions permanently. This week, a Bloomberg article titled ‘AI Will Erase Middle Management’ highlighted comments from a Goldman Sachs executive about how AI is changing traditional management roles with younger employees already managing AI agents.
So, what does this mean for you today? I'm sure you are already trying to figure out where you fit into the world of work today. I'm doing the same thing. In general, I advise my clients to focus more on the work at hand than the title that goes along with it.
Titles are wonky in general: a Director at a Fortune 500 company can have a lot more responsibility than a VP at a startup. In particular, I'd recommend that you focus on how the work that you do affects overall strategy. For example, if you are advising the C-Suite or executive leadership on decision-making, then I would spell that out in your resume, LinkedIn, and in interviews. AI can never replace your expertise and intuition: this human judgment is going to be what sets you apart in this new world.
AI may tell you otherwise, though. As I fact-checked this piece, my custom ChatGPT flagged my statement that "AI can never replace your expertise and intuition" and responded that "AI can replicate or augment aspects of expertise, even though human judgment remains valuable."
This is what we're dealing with, friends: Chatbots that have never set foot into an office telling you that their intuition can match yours.
I'll leave you with this: it's clear that the "Great Flattening" isn't just a one-time trend and will continue to make its way through Corporate America. Hopefully the people in charge will keep some humanity in mind throughout the process.
Question of the week
There seems to be a debate on LinkedIn as to whether or not to "tailor your resume" to the job description vs not to. What's your take? Additionally, if you tailor your resume to job descriptions, should a person have multiple LinkedIn profiles to align with the types of jobs that are applying for? For example, if I have skills in sales, sales leadership, and operations, that's three distinct job categories that I'm applying for and tailoring my resume will not align with my LinkedIn profile.
In working with 1000+ clients, I've only had one or two situations where a candidate needed two very different resumes (a case that stands out to me is a practicing lawyer who also started his own business who needed vastly different resumes for two different roles).
For me, you should have one base resume that you make very minor tweaks to (maybe you change the resume headline to match the target role or you change the order of the bullets around to emphasize certain skills). That's why it's important to identify your career goals before you get started - so that you write a resume that you can use to apply for all of the roles that you are applying for.
You definitely don't want more than one LinkedIn profile - you should only have one LinkedIn profile that encompasses all of your skills (and that LinkedIn profile should be aligned with your resume).
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Take care of yourself and have a wonderful weekend!
Colleen
