Your Boss Doesn’t Have Time to Talk to You
Amazon wants bigger teams. Bank of America is flattening. Corporate America is shedding managers, and the workplace is changing radically.
By Chip Cutter and Lindsay Ellis
Need a minute with your boss?
Good luck.
Managers are overseeing more people as companies large and small gut layers of middle managers in the name of cutting bloat and creating nimbler yet larger teams.
Bosses who survive the cuts now oversee roughly triple the people they did almost a decade ago, according to data from research and advisory firm Gartner.
There was one manager for every five employees in 2017.
That median ratio increased to one manager for every 15 employees by 2023, and it appears to be growing further today, Gartner says.
Google recently said it had cut 35% of its managers of small teams following a restructuring.
Amazon, one of the U.S.’s largest employers, told investors earlier this year that it is working to increase the ratio of employees to managers.
Many other employers want to flatten hierarchies.
Intel eliminated 50% of its management layers.
Estée Lauder and dating-app operator Match Group said they had each cut around 20% of their managers.
Citi, Bank of America and United Parcel Service cut management tiers or supervisors in recent years, too.
The result is that the workplace is changing radically as the relationship between bosses and employees undergoes a dramatic shift.
Harried managers need new strategies to run ever-larger teams and keep up with an ever-expanding list of duties.
Many employees say they need to talk up their accomplishments because the boss is too busy to notice, and they have just a few minutes to do it.
And both sides agree, only high-performing self-starters thrive.
“If you hire Michael Jordan, they don’t need the same level of attention day-to-day as a rookie,” says Josh Isner, president of Axon Enterprise, a Scottsdale, Ariz., security-equipment company that cut hundreds of managers earlier this year.
The small fiefdoms Axon managers used to lead—an average of four people for every supervisor—were, he says, “borderline offensive.”
Employing fewer people—especially fewer managers—is viewed among boards of directors and investors as a sign of a company’s strength.
Indeed, many companies cutting managers aren’t in a position of weakness.
Instead, they see eliminating potential bureaucracy as a way to ensure organizations stay nimble.
Managers, meanwhile, say they worry they’re unable to guide employees, let alone stand in as a career coach, mentor or productivity nudge.
There isn’t time.
Want career guidance?
Talk with a more senior peer.
“It’s a pretty big recipe for disaster, which I think is completely self imposed,” says Beth Steinberg, a longtime human-resources executive in the technology industry, who has been hearing from overburdened workers and managers across Silicon Valley in recent months.
One manager she knows now oversees about 20 people.
“They cannot spend time with their employees, they cannot help develop their employees,” she says.
“Really the only thing they can do is push the work forward.”
The new role of boss
Pharmaceutical and agricultural giant Bayer has slashed its number of managers, cut rules and processes, and granted far more autonomy to workers over the past two years.
Two dozen people now report to marketing vice president Lisa Perez in a team that ranges from assistant brand managers to marketing directors for such products as One A Day, Aleve, Midol and Bayer Aspirin.
She no longer reviews most expense reports; an artificial-intelligence tool handles routine approvals.
When Perez, who often works out of Bayer’s offices in New Jersey, meets with her team, she says she tries to act as an adviser, not someone who must sign off on each step in a project.
Instead of scheduling lots of one-on-ones each week, she blocks a period on her calendar every Friday for “coaching hours.”
Employees can come to her for career advice, help on business problems they’re looking to solve or something else.
“If we don’t get it right as leaders, we’ll be the roadblock,” she says.
This is a fundamental change in the role of manager.
In the 1950s, the father of modern management theory, Peter Drucker, chronicled the dawn of an era where managers set objectives, motivated workers and helped develop them as professionals.
Expectations of managers only grew over time.
Bosses weren’t just supervisors, but leaders, meant to build trust, inspire employees and give them a sense of purpose.
Over the past decade or so, employees looked to managers for even more.
Bosses touted themselves as “servant leaders,” guiding a company through collaboration and humility, and creating an environment where younger employees felt comfortable to be their true selves.
Many millennials expected bosses to know their birth dates and to make time to hear a recap of their weekends.
The delayering of corporate America has happened swiftly.
Across U.S. public companies, the number of managers dropped 6% over the past three years, according to employment-data provider Live Data Technologies.
Now, many workers feel less engaged because they often don’t hear from their managers, says Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., head of the human-resources professional association SHRM.
A recent Gallup survey showed less than half of employees said they know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% at the start of 2020.
‘I am struggling’
Managing bigger teams is a skill that many bosses are struggling to master.
Eryk Jeznach, a manager for a health regulator in Vancouver, British Columbia, started his role in April with eight direct reports.
Now he has 11.
He began with weekly one-on-ones for some team members.
He’s shifting those meetings to every other week or monthly to make his workload more manageable.
“I am struggling to keep on top of everything,” the 38-year-old says.
“I’m trying to save my own bandwidth.”
Jeznach keeps a running task list using Microsoft’s Sticky Notes app divided into his three subteams and his own projects.
He sometimes loses track of what he needs to do—to approve spending, for example—but colleagues chase him down.
He often wakes up by 4:30 a.m. thinking about work: “I generally feel a consistent state of inadequacy.”
If employees once expected their boss to know their kids’ names or whether they liked Taylor Swift, some bosses say they may no longer be able to offer such a personal touch.
As teams have grown and shifted, managers can no longer serve every role, many say.
Harsha Sanagaram, who has been at Microsoft for more than a decade, now manages eight people after absorbing a former colleague’s team.
That’s doable, but Sanagaram also doesn’t chitchat about life outside of work unless a team member brings it up.
“My mantra is simple: I don’t ask about their personal stuff at all,” he says, adding that he doesn’t know if some colleagues are single or married.
“There is a boundary, and I do not cross it.”
Sanagaram, an engineering manager in Redmond, Wash., has landed on a weekly cadence for one-on-one meetings with his staff, which means his calendar resembles a game of Tetris.
“You don’t want to wait two weeks to hear they have a problem,” he says.
The employee-to-manager ratio
The senior leaders driving the delayering are willing to put up with short-term chaos.
Organizations often strip out too many management layers—and then add back in to achieve the right ratio of direct reports to leaders, says Rob Hornby, co-CEO of the management consulting firm AlixPartners.
“Trying to do this incrementally, in my experience, I’ve not seen that work.
The organization tends to try to resist it,” Hornby says.
“You can take a calculated risk, go a bit far, work out the root causes of what’s not going right and very selectively build back.”
Some managers delegate to spread the workload as their teams grow.
Stephen Condor has 36 direct reports—more than double the 16 people he started with four years ago.
The customer-service manager has told them to ask one another and his assistant manager for guidance before approaching him.
“I can’t be a manager of this many people and also still be the go-to person for every single need,” says Condor, 30, of Frederick, Md.
At Axon, which makes body cameras and tasers, executives cut the number of managers from roughly 1,250 to 700, reassigning supervisors of small teams back to roles as individual employees.
Some managers balked at losing their power and being asked to return to an individual role.
Yet, keeping the status quo wasn’t an option, said Isner, the president.
“I just don’t think there’s any better way to ensure that you’re going to slow down, become more bureaucratic and become less agile in product development than making sure that you have plenty of managers for every couple employees,” he said.
A senior software engineer at Axon, Patrick Flynn is now on a team of six employees with one manager, about double the ratio of his previous groups.
“It allows us to kind of all be adults and manage ourselves,” Flynn says.
“I go to my manager when I need help with something.
I don’t feel this kind of presence over my shoulder, so to speak.”
Axon has suggested Mondays as a day for one-on-one meetings with employees, so managers of larger teams can set expectations for the week and then spend the rest of their time trying to meet those goals.
Axon is aiming for a ratio of seven employees for every one manager, but Isner said he’d be happy to see even bigger teams across the company in the coming years.
“I want to keep pushing the envelope,” Isner says.
“The worst thing that happens is we hire a few more managers, but the best thing that happens is we pick up a ton of speed and give people a lot of autonomy.”
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