Layoffs are sweeping corporate America, and many middle managers are trying to keep their heads above water juggling new responsibilities. It’s slowing internal processes down and stretching supervisors thin. So Amazon’s Andy Jassy is putting more power in the hands of employees doing the work, instead of those with sign-off powers.
“You add a lot of people and you end up with a lot of middle managers. And those middle managers, all well-intended, want to put their fingerprint on everything,” the CEO said in a recent interview with Bloomberg.
“So you end up with these people being in the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the decision meeting, and not always making recommendations and owning things the way we want that type of ownership.”
This isn’t the first time the CEO of the $2.3 trillion tech giant has said that he’s flattening the company’s hierarchy, but he’s just revealed that Amazon is well ahead of schedule.
Last September the Amazon veteran said that he wanted to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025."
Now he’s said that Amazon has already beat that marker—and that this change will free up mobility and put more onus on individual employees.
“It’s going to allow us, for the people that are doing the work, they’re gonna have more ownership and they’re going to be able to move more quickly,” Jassy said.
By doing so, the future of Amazon will have fewer bosses, where employees are expected to manage themselves and drive togetherness in the organization. A huge part of driving that company culture, for Jassy, includes a strict five-day RTO mandate.
Jassy might be giving more power to workers—with fewer supervisors and individual-focused improvements—but employees still have to bend the knee to RTO.
Despite Amazon employees “rage applying” to jobs in the face of the mandate, reporting strong dissatisfaction in a survey, and sending a strongly worded letter to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) chief, the company isn’t backing down.
"If there are people who just don't work well in that environment and don't want to, that's okay, there are other companies around," AWS CEO Matt Garman said during an Amazon all-hands meeting last November, according to Reuters. “When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we're not in-person."
While RTO isn’t super popular among workers in general, Amazon’s managerial decoupling and increased employee autonomy is exactly what Gen Z is looking for.
Amazon has not immediately responded to Fortune’s request for comment.
Jassy isn’t the only leader to call out middle managers, or get rid of them entirely.
In 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “flattening” was essential to the business’s restructure. He wrote that by asking many middle managers to become individual contributors, the change would make the company’s information flow faster. Zuckerberg even credited the idea of sloughing off supervisors to Elon Musk, when other CEOs were too “shy” to do so. Google also cut middle management positions in 2023, telling employees it would be harder to get into those roles moving forward.
In an effort to recoup $2.15 billion, pharmaceutical giant Bayer fired all of its supervisors last year, asking its nearly 100,000 employees to self-organize. CEO Bill Anderson cited concerns over ineffectual bureaucracy and difficulty in getting things done quickly. And in his most recent letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett wrote that one of his mistakes was not vetting middle managers well enough in hiring. Choosing to invest in people who weren’t driving the company forward was hurtful culturally and economically.
“I’ve made mistakes when assessing the abilities or fidelity of the managers Berkshire is hiring,” he wrote. “The fidelity disappointments can hurt beyond their financial impact, a pain that can approach that of a failed marriage."
A flattened hierarchy and the prospect of fewer middle management roles to grow into could actually entice—rather than put off—the bright young minds of tomorrow.
That’s because more than half, about 52%, of Gen Z workers said they’d rather not be middle managers, according to a 2025 survey from recruitment company Robert Walters. And 72% of these young employees said they’d rather take an “individual route to progression” than supervise other people. Part of their aversion to managing likely stems from the intense burnout they witness among their bosses—stretched thin by a lack of support, constant company changes, and reduced well-being.
Gen Z’s lack-of-leadership mentality is perfect for companies like Amazon moving to individual contributor-style structures. This trend has been dubbed “conscious unbossing”: circumventing managerial responsibilities to spearhead their own personal growth. It’s not that they don’t want success—Gen Z just wants to be their own boss and have better work-life balance.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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