The average manager in the United States is now responsible for more people than at any point since Gallup started tracking the number. New Gallup research puts the average span of control, the number of employees reporting to one manager, at 12.1 in 2025, up from 10.9 the year before and nearly 50% higher than when Gallup first measured it in 2013. Large employers are driving most of that increase by removing layers of middle management and spreading their former teams across whoever remains, a pattern some analysts have started calling the "Great Flattening." Amazon put a specific figure on the ambition. In September 2024, CEO Andy Jassy directed each major organization inside the company (opens in new tab) to raise its ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, a move the company framed around cutting bureaucracy and moving decisions closer to the customers those decisions affect. Not every added direct report traces back to a corporate mandate, though. Some of it starts with managers themselves, and how long they hold onto a team long after the workload stopped requiring the extra hands. Owner-led businesses rarely had multiple management layers to cut in the first place, but the same question lands on them just as hard: as a team grows past the size one person can lead by instinct, does the person leading it know how to manage at that new scale, or is everyone simply hoping the old habits still hold?
Leaders treat span of control as a metric. It's actually a confession: hoarded headcount, stalled growth, and connection that was never there.
— Vibhas Ratanjee, Global Practice Leader for Leadership Development, Gallup, writing in Forbes
Gallup's own numbers complicate the second half of that idea, without erasing it. The typical manager's job hasn't changed as much as the average suggests: median span of control has held at five to six employees for more than a decade, even as the mean climbs. A relatively small share of very large teams, twenty-five direct reports or more, is pulling the average upward while most managers still lead teams closer to the old norm. The managers who handle a bigger team well aren't the most driven or the most confident; they're the ones who stopped doing the job they had before the promotion. Gallup found that 97% of U.S. managers carry individual contributor responsibilities on top of leading others, spending a median 40% of their time on that work rather than on managing. Managers who exceed that 40% threshold show declining engagement as their teams grow larger; managers who spend less time on hands-on work keep higher engagement regardless of how many people report to them. Manager talent moderates the effect further: Gallup's analysis of validated management-talent assessments found that highly talented managers overseeing very large teams and heavy individual-contributor workloads still sustain higher engagement than lower-talent managers leading much smaller teams. A business can hand someone six more direct reports without ever freeing up the hours it takes to lead six more people well, and whoever holds that job absorbs the gap, usually by working longer hours, coaching less, or both. That's part of what drives managers to cling to headcount long after the workload justifies it: giving up a direct report can feel like losing standing, even when the honest math says the team has already outgrown what one person can lead alone.
average number of employees reporting to a single U.S. manager in 2025, up from 10.9 in 2024 and nearly 50% higher than when Gallup first measured span of control in 2013. Gallup, "Span of Control: What's the Optimal Team Size for Managers?" →
That gap is exactly where leadership development is supposed to intervene, and it's where most owner-led businesses have the least formal structure to fall back on. A manager who's absorbed a bigger team but never handed off any of their old individual work is a manager without the extra hours a bigger job requires. The fix isn't always a new hire. Part of it is already covered in GH Group's case for building leaders who don't need a founder in the room: identifying which decisions a manager is still making personally that someone else on the team is ready to own, then handing those off on purpose instead of by accident. The same logic applies one level down, from manager to the people who report to them. Gallup's research points to one habit that predicts engagement more reliably than team size on its own: whether a manager gives each employee meaningful feedback at least once a week. In a separate Gallup study (opens in new tab) of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16% said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful. Employees who strongly agreed they'd received meaningful feedback in the past week were engaged at roughly three times the rate of those who hadn't, regardless of how many people their manager oversaw. For an owner watching a flatter org chart ask more of fewer managers, that's the more useful number to act on: a manager leading fifteen people well beats a manager leading six poorly, and the difference rarely comes down to team size by itself. It comes down to whether anyone ever taught that manager what leading a bigger team requires, and whether anyone ever took anything off their plate to make room for it, instead of assuming the skills and the hours would both scale on their own.
