The quiet story of 2026 is not that organisations are hiring more leaders. It is that they are asking each remaining leader to lead more people. The wave of delayering, the flattening of org charts, the cull of the middle: all of it lands in the same place, on the manager who now opens a team chat with a few more faces than last year, and is somehow expected to coach, decide and steady every one of them.
Gallup reports the average manager now oversees 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 a year earlier, as organisations flatten and cut middle layers. Wider spans do not automatically make managers worse, but they remove the slack that hid weak leadership skill. The fix is not another model. It is rehearsing the human moments of leading more people until composure and clear feedback become trained habits.
Why This Matters Now
Delayering has gone from a cost exercise to a structural shift. Through 2026 the language of flatter structures, of unbossing, of leaner middle management, has moved from the consulting deck into real org charts. DDI calls it the Great Flattening: fewer layers, leadership dispersed sideways, and a warning that cutting those middle layers can backfire, breaking communication and fuelling burnout among the managers who remain.
For UK organisations this is not abstract. The manager who used to run a team of eight now runs a team of twelve, with the same hours, the same difficult conversations, and less room to get any of them wrong. When the span widens, the cost of a manager who cannot give clear feedback, or hold a steady line in a hard moment, does not stay flat. It multiplies across every extra person now relying on them.
What The Research Says
The number is precise and recent. In its Span of Control analysis (published January 2026), Gallup found that the average number of people reporting to a single manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, part of a nearly 50% increase in team size since Gallup first measured the figure in 2013. The same analysis is blunt about what decides the outcome: larger teams thrive or struggle depending on manager talent and the quality of the feedback people actually receive. Size is not the verdict. Skill is.
That last point is the one most flattening programmes skate past. With eight reports, a leader who avoids the awkward conversation or freezes when challenged can hide in the slack. With twelve, the gaps show. Clear feedback, steady judgement and the safety to speak up become harder to fake and more expensive to lack. Google's Project Aristotle (2015) put psychological safety at the top of what separates high-performing teams, echoing Amy Edmondson's earlier work on why safe teams surface problems sooner. A team of twelve that stays silent hands its manager a narrow, dangerous picture at exactly the moment the manager has least time to go looking for the truth.
What Most Organisations Do (And Why It Fails)
Faced with wider spans, the standard response is to brief the new structure and hope managers cope: a reorganisation memo, a refreshed competency framework, perhaps a half-day on the operating model. Knowledge gets transferred. Behaviour does not. A leader who learns the theory of feedback in a calm room does not suddenly give better feedback to twelve people on a bad Tuesday, because the conditions that make the conversation hard, the time pressure, the pushback, the watching team, were never present while they learned it.
So the manager defaults to what is fastest rather than best. They postpone the difficult one-to-one, smooth over the underperformance, and confuse being busy with leading. That is what trained-in-comfort skill does when the load spikes, and the flatter the structure, the more often it spikes.
What Works
Some things cannot be taught, they have to be felt. Leading more people well is one of them. You cannot read your way to a steady, honest conversation with a stretched team any more than you can read your way to swimming. The skill is behavioural, and behavioural skills are built by rehearsing them under conditions close enough to the real thing that the body learns the response. That is the case for simulation: a manager makes live decisions and holds real conversations with trained actors who push back and withhold context, so the pressure is genuine rather than imagined. A manager who has met the moment in rehearsal is far harder to ambush for real. This is the heart of our simulation training and our wider leadership training in London, built to develop the behaviour that wider spans demand, not just the awareness of it.
Strengthen the behaviour of one manager and you change the daily experience of all twelve people who report to them: the feedback they get, the safety they feel, whether their problems surface early or late. Psychological safety is the multiplier here, and our explainer on what psychological safety is sets out how a leader builds it and why it holds when conditions get hard. Get that right and a team of twelve becomes a strength of the flatter structure, not its first casualty.
Where Sidestream Fits
We are a behaviour change consultancy that combines organisational psychology with immersive theatre, and managers under a widening span are squarely the problem we are built for. Our work spans workshop-scale training through larger immersive simulations to tailored behaviour change programmes. If your structure is getting flatter and your managers are quietly carrying more than they can lead well, book a free 30-minute diagnostic call and we will talk it through.
The Span-of-Control Squeeze: The Takeaways
As organisations flatten and cut middle layers, each remaining manager leads more people. Gallup puts the average span at 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9 a year before. Wider spans do not make managers worse, but they strip away the slack that used to hide weak leadership skill, so feedback, composure and psychological safety now matter more, not less. The reliable fix is rehearsal, not another model.
- Gallup's Span of Control analysis (January 2026) found the average manager oversees 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9 in 2024, a nearly 50% rise in team size since 2013.
- DDI's Great Flattening warns that cutting middle layers can break communication and fuel burnout among the managers who remain.
- Size is not the verdict, skill is: Gallup notes larger teams thrive or struggle depending on manager talent and the quality of feedback people receive.
- Psychological safety is the multiplier across a wider span. Project Aristotle (2015) ranked it the top team dynamic, echoing Edmondson's research.
- Theory learned in comfort does not survive a stretched team on a hard day. Rehearsal under realistic pressure builds the behaviour that wider spans demand.