If streaming has a middle‑management problem, it’s that companies keep sawing off the very branch they’re sitting on. Over the last few years, as streaming platforms lurched from growth‑at‑all‑costs to profitability‑at‑all‑costs, the easiest story to tell Wall Street was: “We’re flattening. We’re cutting layers. We’re getting lean.” In practice, that often meant hollowing out managers and directors while holding more control in the C‑suite. This was precisely the opposite of what complex, high‑velocity businesses actually need.
The Great Flattening comes for streaming
Across tech and media, middle managers have been a primary target in recent years. Analyses of recent layoff waves show that managers make up a disproportionately large share of cuts compared with pre‑pandemic years, even as postings for new middle‑management roles have dropped sharply. In entertainment and media alone, tens of thousands of jobs have been eliminated, with “removing layers” and “simplifying structures” cited as core justifications as major conglomerates restructure their org charts.
Streaming has followed the same script. The same companies that overhired during the COVID boom later raced to show discipline by trimming “redundant” management layers and “flattening” decision‑making. On paper, it sounds efficient. On the ground, it looks like directors and managers disappearing from org charts, spans of control doubling, and senior leaders trying to become “fighting generals,” personally arbitrating prioritization, resourcing, and risk in environments that change faster than their calendars can keep up.
Control from the top is a bottleneck, not a safeguard
In his work on modern warfare and organizational leadership, General Stanley McChrystal makes a core point: as environments become more complex and fast‑moving, centralized control stops being a safeguard and becomes a liability. The organization can no longer move at the speed of the environment if information and decisions are forced to bottleneck at the top. Streaming is a textbook example of this complexity, with shifting monetization strategies, new library acquisitions, AI‑driven tooling landing faster than governance can be written, and live ops that cannot wait for a weekly SVP review cycle.
In a complex, fast‑moving business like streaming, cutting middle management and pulling decisions upward is a false economy. It looks “lean” on a slide, but in practice it slows everything down and hardens silos, because every exception and trade‑off gets forced through a handful of executives who are too far from the work and too overloaded to respond at the speed of operations. If you actually want to run more efficiently, you have to decentralize decision‑making – push authority and context out to the managers and teams closest to the problems – rather than centralize it at the top.
When middle managers are removed or sidelined, companies are re-designing decision-making away from the subject matter experts. Instead, control creeps upward. Exceptions, escalations, risks, and everyday “what should we do?” questions that were once resolved by managers now queue up for VPs and C‑suite leaders. Those executives are too far from the work to assess trade‑offs quickly and too overloaded to respond fast, so decisions arrive late, incomplete, or not at all. The organization experiences this as dropped balls, mysterious slowdowns, and a sharp decline in the quality of decisions that used to be handled close to the work.
What middle managers actually do (that AI won’t replace)
The caricature of middle management is a bureaucratic “frozen middle” that gums up the works. The reality, especially in complex operational environments like streaming, is that strong managers are multiplicative force.
Leadership research reframes middle managers as strategic accelerators: the primary channel through which strategy reaches the frontline and through which reality reaches the C‑suite. Employees are far more likely to hear about company strategy, and to make sense of it, from their direct supervisor than from an all‑hands email or town hall.
When that layer is healthy and empowered, managers do four critical things that AI and “flattened” structures cannot substitute for:
- They translate ambiguous strategy into concrete, prioritized work for their teams, adjusting in real time as conditions change and ensuring alignment between daily tasks and company goals.
- They coordinate across functions: product, content ops, marketing, legal, ad ops, so that decisions are consistent, trade‑offs are explicit instead of accidental, and cross‑team alignment improves instead of eroding.
- They coach, develop, and protect people, which directly affects retention, engagement, and the emergence of future leaders.
- They surface problems early and propose improvements from the “boots on the ground” vantage point, before those problems turn into outages, bad launches, or public embarrassments.
These are exactly the activities that keep metadata clean, operations reliable, and launches sane in a streaming business. They are also the activities that AI is least equipped to do in the near term. Generative tools can draft tickets and documentation, summarize meetings, and even propose risk scenarios, but they do not hold trust relationships, arbitrate competing human priorities, or take real accountability for messy, cross‑functional decisions.
The senior leadership pipeline problem
There is a longer‑term consequence that should worry streaming leaders: the collapse of the senior leadership pipeline. Most executives do not jump directly from individual contributor roles to the C‑suite; they learn to manage conflict, reconcile competing priorities, communicate across cultures and functions, and make decisions with incomplete information in middle‑management roles. When that layer is thinned out, so is the hope of incoming senior leadership who can be a true competitive advantage.
Middle managers are also the primary scouts and sponsors of emerging leaders. They see who can handle stretch assignments, who can manage through ambiguity, who can build alignment across temperamental teams, and who can represent the company externally without freaking out the lawyers. When you ignore, overburden, or eliminate that layer, you lose not only execution capacity but the entire informal system that identifies, tests, and grows the next generation of all leadership. The result is an org chart with two solid layers: ICs and executives, with no path between them, which is the corporate equivalent of building a high‑rise on stilts.
The costs of cutting the middle
There is now a visible pattern. Leadership and HR analyses of the “Great Flattening” warn that removing this layer has created “systemic vulnerabilities” in many organizations, including breakdowns in communication and alignment, rising burnout, and declining financial performance. Surveys describe middle‑manager burnout as an “organizational emergency,” with high rates of stress and job‑hunting that threaten institutional knowledge.
At the same time, spans of control have ballooned. In many companies, remaining managers now oversee significantly larger teams than they did a few years ago, while being asked to pick up the responsibilities of the roles that were cut. The people left in the middle no longer have the bandwidth to coach, coordinate, or improve; they are reduced to throughput constraints, signing off on tasks without time to think. Frontline employees feel abandoned and confused, executives feel like they are shouting into the void, and both sides blame each other instead of recognizing that the connective tissue was deliberately removed.
Consulting and academic work shows strong correlations between effective middle management and higher team performance, stronger engagement, better innovation outcomes, and more reliable strategy execution. Gallup’s research estimates that managers account for about 70% of the variance in employee engagement across teams, and teams with highly effective managers see markedly better business outcomes, including double the engagement levels and materially higher productivity and advocacy, than teams with weaker managers. When companies hollow out this layer, they sacrifice those gains and then wonder why their bold strategies never fully materialize on the ground.
Horizontal thinking and cross‑training the middle
The real unlock is getting managers to think horizontally instead of vertically. Cross‑training and shared, cross‑functional goals turn middle managers into lateral connectors who move information, decisions, and trust sideways across the company, not just up and down. When you keep and cross‑train your middle layer, you’re actively de‑siloing the company.
Middle managers are not a legacy artifact to be engineered away; they are one of the few roles that can help companies navigate what comes next. As AI reshapes workflows and how decisions get made, organizations will need leaders who can translate between human teams and increasingly automated systems, redesign roles on the fly, and keep people aligned around purpose instead of just tasks. Investing in middle management is a practical workforce‑development strategy, not a nostalgic one.
For streaming, this is an inflection point. Platforms that rebuild their middle layer now will be positioned to move faster and smarter as the market stabilizes. Instead of treating managers as a disposable in‑between layer, treating them as designers of the future org turns them into a genuine competitive advantage in an industry that badly needs one.
Rebecca Avery is the Owner and Principal of Integration Therapy, a performance-based operations firm that helps media companies recover leaking revenue and scale with clarity, speed, and control.
