The Great Unbossing and the Conscious Unbossing Are the Same Failure
The middle of the organisation is emptying out, and it's happening from two directions at once. We've named the two halves separately, blamed them on different people, and largely missed that they're the same event.
The first half comes from the top. Companies are deliberately cutting the management layer, a shift the business press started calling the great unbossing in 2024. The numbers behind it are real. According to Live Data Technologies, middle managers made up around a fifth of layoffs in 2018, close to a third by 2023, and nearly half in 2024. Citigroup has been reducing its management layers from 13 to 8. UPS cut roughly 12,000 manager roles in a single move. The stated logic is efficiency, and in fairness there's something to it, because a bloated hierarchy really does slow a company down.
The second half comes from the bottom, where the people who would normally fill that layer are quietly declining to. Robert Walters' research, which is where the phrase conscious unbossing comes from, found that more than half of Gen Z professionals are steering clear of management on purpose, that close to seven in ten see middle management as high stress for low reward, and that a clear majority would rather build their careers through their own expertise than by managing a team. This gets narrated as a values shift, a generation that has looked at the corner office and decided it isn't worth the climb.
So we have companies removing the layer and individuals refusing to enter it, both happening to the same layer at the same time.
The Part Almost No One Is Writing
What makes this worth paying attention to is the overlap. The management layer that firms are thinning from above is the same layer people are avoiding from below. And that layer does real work. It trains people, absorbs pressure that would otherwise land on teams, turns strategy into something a team can actually execute, and holds things together when they wobble. When it gets squeezed from both ends at the same time, the risk isn't only that we end up with fewer managers. It's that the function itself, the part of an organisation that develops the next generation of leaders, starts to thin out before anyone has decided what should replace it.
Why Walking Away Is a Reasonable Thing to Do
It would be easy to read the conscious unbossing as a generation going soft, and that reading would be wrong. People aren't turning down leadership because they can't handle responsibility. They're turning down a version of the job that has been set up to defeat whoever takes it.
Look at what actually happens to someone who says yes. The Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of managers move into the role with no formal training of any kind. Research cited widely across the field puts the failure rate of unprepared first-time managers at close to 60% within their first two years. DDI's 2025 Global Leadership Forecast found that 71% of leaders report a significant rise in stress once they step up. We take people who were good at their own work, make them responsible for others, give them almost nothing to prepare with, and then treat the struggle that follows as a personal failing. Anyone who has watched a manager go through that and decided they'd rather stay an individual contributor has read the odds accurately.
The Harder Question Underneath
Once you accept that the refusal is rational, a more uncomfortable question opens up, and it isn't really about Gen Z at all. It's about the market. As organisations flatten, there are simply fewer management roles to move into, so some of what gets described as a conscious choice may also be a sensible response to a door that is slowly closing anyway. What's striking is how convenient the framing is for everyone involved. It lets companies cut the layer and call it modernisation, and it lets individuals step back and call it a values decision, while the quieter truth is that the ladder is losing rungs. None of that makes anyone dishonest. It just means the trend is telling us less about one generation's priorities than it first appears, and more about a structure that is shifting under all of us.
Where This Is Heading
None of this eases with time. As AI absorbs more of the routine individual work, the tasks that remain will lean harder on judgment, coordination and the handling of other people, which pushes more of the workforce toward leadership rather than away from it, and often earlier than before. The path into management is about to matter more, and more people are going to be walking onto it, which makes it a strange moment to be neglecting it as badly as we are.
The layer was never the problem, and neither is the generation declining to join it. What we've never taken seriously is the work of preparing people to lead, and we're now paying for that on both sides at once.
Sources. "Conscious unbossing": Robert Walters research on Gen Z and middle management, 2024 (also discussed in Forbes). "Great unbossing": a business-press label from 2024 (Forbes and others) for the cutting of middle-management roles; underlying layoff-share data from Live Data Technologies, with Citigroup and UPS restructuring figures as reported. Management training: Chartered Management Institute (CMI). First-time manager failure rate: CEB Global and related field research. Stress on stepping up: DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025.
A note on the numbers. Robert Walters has run this research across several markets and the headline figures vary by country (avoidance of management runs at roughly 52% in the UK, 57% in Canada and 42% in Switzerland). The phrasing above uses representative ranges rather than any single market's figure, so the claim holds wherever the reader sits.