Only 6% want your job: the leadership pipeline the great flattening destroyed
By Eylem Samland, FIERA Leadership. Published 2026-08-17.
A restructure gets announced. A layer of managers is consolidated. The org chart gets flatter. On the Monday that follows, someone you know shows up with three jobs: their own role, the role of the person who left, and the coordinating work of the layer below that also got thinned. Their team went from eight people to twenty-two. Nobody has a real conversation with them about it.
They do not say anything. They cannot. Complaining marks you as someone who could not handle the "empowered" role. So they absorb it, and then, quietly, over the next two or three years, they break.
The numbers are worse than most senior leaders realise
- Gartner projects that by the end of 2026, one in five companies will have used AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions.
- Between 2017 and 2023, the average number of direct reports per manager rose from 5 to 15, and in flattened organisations it is higher still.
- Research consistently shows management quality drops sharply beyond 8 to 10 direct reports.
Which means most managers in flat structures right now are doing the job badly. Not because they are bad at it. Because nobody can do the job well at that scale.
The bill arrives in about two years
Only 6% of Gen Z want senior leadership roles, according to Deloitte. Six percent. They are not opting out because they are lazy. They watched what happened to their managers. The "empowered" ones got crushed, the survivors became the person nobody wanted to be, and the rung above them was deleted for cost savings. They drew the obvious conclusion: building toward leadership means building toward something the company considers expendable.
A flat structure is not an innovation. It is a debt instrument. You are borrowing capability from three years in the future to make this year’s numbers look better.
The pattern is easy to predict. A VP quits. Someone looks at the org chart for a replacement and nobody is close. The strongest director declines, because she watched what happened to the last two people in that seat. So the company hires externally, and that hire lasts about fourteen months, because whatever burned out the last VP is still there.
The honest question
Do you know who your next VP is? By name. Not the org chart placeholder, the actual person being developed right now: getting coaching, getting stretch assignments inside their capacity, getting exposure to complexity in a way that builds them rather than breaks them.
If you cannot name that person for every senior role, you do not have a leadership pipeline. You have an assumption that the market will provide. The market has already told you it will not.
If someone on your team is quietly holding it all up after the last restructure, that is a solvable problem while they are still there. Book a free discovery call