Everyone wants to kill the middle manager role. The data says don’t do it!

The case against the ‘Great Flattening.’

Excerpt: "Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units.

Seventy percent. It’s not perks, or even words that a CEO says in an all-hands. It’s the person your team member reports to that controls the vast majority of how much effort they choose to put into their work.

And engagement isn’t a soft metric. Gallup has linked it to customer ratings, profitability, productivity, quality, turnover, absenteeism, theft, and safety incidents. Everything an executive actually cares about runs through the manager layer. So when a CEO asks, “Do we even need managers?,” what they’re really asking is: “Can we cut 70% of the variance in our results and hope it goes the right way?”'