2026-10-22
October 22, 2026
Management layers shrank and spans widened. The work those layers did did not disappear. It landed on staff engineers, TPMs and chiefs of staff, who now carry the load with none of the power.
Every flattening announcement makes the same quiet promise: fewer layers, faster decisions. The arithmetic is real. Haider Alleg, drawing on Gusto payroll data, reports that managers at small and mid-sized employers went from a little over three individual contributors each in 2019 to nearly six in 2024. Gallup, as cited by Flavia Moura, puts the average span at 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9.
The arithmetic is incomplete, though. A manager with twice the reports does not do half the coordination. She drops the part that is invisible on the org chart: brokering between teams, resolving priority conflicts, noticing that two programs are about to collide. Moura's argument is that this work did not vanish. It migrated, partly to chief of staff roles that carry no direct reports and so never show up in the span-of-control number that flattening is judged by. Her "invoice" metaphor is the right one. The bill still arrives. It just has a different addressee.
For senior TPMs and the tech leaders who sponsor them, that addressee is you. You are now asked to align organizations whose leaders have less time for you and whose reporting lines you cannot change. That is a different job from the one the title describes, and it rewards a different technique than "be more persuasive."
When a TPM fails to move a decision, the usual post-mortem blames communication: wrong deck, wrong framing, wrong moment. Sometimes true. More often the proposal collided with forces that persuasion cannot touch: a director whose team is already at the edge of its span, a peer whose goals are measured on the opposite outcome, a budget cycle that closed in September.
LeadDev's guidance on leading without authority names the problem list plainly: generating buy-in, maintaining accountability, navigating politics, and limited resources. It also lists tactics, from data-backed proposals to incentive alignment, with escalation as the last resort. All of it is sound. What it lacks is a way to choose among those tactics. That is where a diagnostic earns its keep.
Kurt Lewin's force field analysis (developed in his field theory work in the 1940s and set out in Field Theory in Social Science, 1951) treats any current state as an equilibrium between driving forces pushing toward change and restraining forces holding it in place. His practical insight, and the part most people skip, is that you do not have to out-push the status quo. You can lower the restraints. Pushing harder on a stable equilibrium raises tension on both sides and the system snaps back. Removing a restraint moves the equilibrium without a fight.
Applied to a cross-org decision, this changes where you spend your week. Say you need three teams to adopt a shared deployment gate. The driving forces are obvious and you have probably already pitched them: fewer incidents, an audit requirement, executive interest. Now list the restraints honestly, by name. Team A's lead fears losing release autonomy. Team B has no one to build the integration this quarter. Team C's director reads the gate as a headcount ask in disguise. Notice that your deck addresses none of the restraints. Each one calls for a different move: a delegated override for A, a time-boxed loaner engineer for B, a written statement of zero new headcount for C. None of those is persuasion. All of them are design.
Flattening makes this technique more valuable, not less. Restraints used to be negotiated through a shared manager. Now there are fewer shared managers and the restraints are lateral and unspoken. The one skill that scales is surfacing them. Ask each stakeholder directly: "What would have to be true for this to be easy for you?" The answers are your restraining forces, in their words.
Two cautions. First, scores are optional. Rating forces from 1 to 5 helps a group see where the weight sits, but a total of 14 versus 11 is not a measurement, and treating it as one is how people talk themselves into false confidence. Second, a force field is a snapshot. Redo it when the org changes under you, which in this climate is often.
Try this week. Pick one stalled cross-team decision. Before your next stakeholder conversation, write a two-column page: drivers on the left, restraints on the right, each restraint attributed to a named person. Then in that conversation, ask only about the right-hand column. Do not pitch.
What it is. A way to diagnose why a change is or is not happening by listing the forces pushing for it and the forces holding it back, then acting on the restraints as readily as on the drivers.
When to use it. A cross-team decision has stalled and the arguments in its favor are not working. Also before a reorg, a platform mandate, or a process change that depends on teams you do not manage.
How to run it:
When NOT to use it. When the decision is already made and only execution remains, or when the real blocker is a single decider who has not been identified. Name the decider first.
Reducing a restraint is often cheaper than adding a driver: a loaner engineer costs less than another quarter of lobbying.
The Post-2023 Flattening Widened Manager Spans Faster Than It Rebuilt Support — Haider Alleg (January 2026) pulls together Gusto and Bain data on spans doubling while support stayed flat. Useful framing for any conversation about why your sponsors have no bandwidth. Much of the analysis sits behind a paywall.
The Chief of Staff Boom Is the Invoice for the Great Flattening — Flavia Moura (August 2026) argues that coordination work migrated into roles that do not register in span-of-control metrics. A thesis, not a proven result; she notes the role may partly be a trend, and the Microsoft cost figure is her own estimate.
Being a Manager of Managers: The Director Transition — An unsigned guide, updated July 2026, that calls org design the most underrated director skill. Treat its compensation and time-allocation figures as one source's estimates, not benchmarks.
"There is nothing so practical as a good theory."
— Kurt Lewin, 1951
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