Companies spent three years deleting middle managers to widen span of control. The coordination work moved upstairs, got a new title, and now costs 75% more per head.
Postings for chief of staff roles have risen 85% since early 2020 and more than doubled in the last year alone, while the number of people holding the title in North America has more than tripled since 2021. Over the same stretch, 41% of employees globally told Korn Ferry their company stripped out management layers. Those are not two stories. Coordination work does not disappear when you delete the box on the org chart that was doing it. It moves to the executive office, where it gets paid more and counted less, because a chief of staff with zero direct reports never shows up in the span-of-control metric that flattening is scored on.
Richard Gelfond hired his first chief of staff at IMAX sixteen years ago and wanted a shadow, someone to take notes and tell him what was next. IMAX has since gone from 55 theaters to nearly 2,000 across more than 90 countries, and the job grew with it. His last chief of staff spent time coordinating with R&D on the camera Christopher Nolan used to shoot “The Odyssey.”
That is the version of the story every CEO wants to tell: complexity went up, so I hired a thinking partner. It is also the version that lets nobody ask the more awkward question, which is what happened to the several hundred people who used to handle coordination before the executive office had to.
What Happened
The New York Times reported on August 6 that chief of staff has become the hot corporate job, with Indeed data showing postings up 85% since early 2020, faster growth than executive assistants or secretaries. Pay runs from $150,000 to more than $200,000 depending on experience, according to a survey by Clara Ma of Ask a Chief of Staff. Search firms including Russell Reynolds are fielding more requests, and the demand has spread past the CEO to vice presidents in marketing, communications, and finance.
Bloomberg got there three weeks earlier with sharper numbers. Postings more than doubled last year according to Revelio Labs, and the count of North Americans holding the title has more than tripled since 2021 according to Live Data Technologies, concentrated in tech and financial services. Salaries typically top out between $250,000 and $300,000 per Ladders founder Marc Cenedella, and occasionally reach $400,000. Median tenure in the role is 2.3 years, McKinsey found, and two-thirds of the people who hold it get promoted afterward.
Buried in that Bloomberg piece is the number that reframes everything: Microsoft alone employs more than 300 chiefs of staff, based on Revelio’s analysis of online job profiles. Microsoft declined to comment.
Hold that next to what Microsoft spent 2025 doing.
The Backstory
On the April 2025 earnings call, CFO Amy Hood said Microsoft was “building high-performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers with fewer managers.” Roughly 6,000 roles went in May, about 9,000 more in July, and total 2025 reductions passed 15,000 out of 228,000 employees. Xbox chief Phil Spencer told his staff the gaming cuts would “follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.” Executives told Business Insider the explicit target was a wider span of control.
Microsoft was not unusual. Google cut vice president and manager roles by 10%. Andy Jassy told Amazon staff in September 2024 to raise the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, complaining that adding people produces middle managers who want to put a fingerprint on everything. Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan told employees the best leaders get the most done with the fewest people.
The numbers moved. Gusto’s data on small and mid-sized businesses shows the average manager’s span of control roughly doubling from three direct reports in 2019 to six in 2025, with about 14% of managerial roles cut. Gallup, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, puts the average at 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9 the prior year and about 50% higher than in 2013. Gartner predicted in late 2024 that through 2026, one in five organizations would use AI to flatten structure and eliminate more than half of current middle management positions.
Korn Ferry surveyed 15,000 workers across ten countries and found 41% globally, and 44% in the US, saying their employer had eliminated managerial levels. The same survey found 43% saying their leaders were not aligned, 37% feeling directionless, and 72% of US senior executives feeling stressed and stretched past their abilities. Korn Ferry Consulting CEO Lesley Uren put it plainly: a leaner organization today can mean a leadership crisis tomorrow.
Then Korn Ferry published a note in July 2026 on the surging demand for chiefs of staff. The firm documented the disease and the symptom eighteen months apart without connecting them.
The Plan
What companies actually did was a swap, and it is worth stating in accounting terms.
They removed a layer of line managers. Line managers have direct reports, sit inside a business unit, carry a piece of the P&L, and appear in every org-design metric a board looks at: layers between the CEO and the front line, average span of control, manager-to-IC ratio. Cutting them improves all three at once, which is why the cuts were announced on earnings calls.
They then added staff officers. A chief of staff reports to one executive, has a single constituent, and in most cases manages nobody. David Astorino of RHR made the structural point in the Times piece: unlike in the military or politics, corporate chiefs of staff have no structural authority. Valerie Jarrett described the job as having no line or departmental responsibility, where the job is the executive.
Here is the mechanical consequence nobody in the coverage priced. A role with zero direct reports has no span of control. Convert a director who managed eight people into a staff officer who manages none, and average span of control across the remaining managers goes up, layer count goes down, and headcount looks flat or better. The metric improves whether or not a single hour of coordination work was actually eliminated.
The Business Model Angle
Now the cost side, which is where this stops being an HR story.
Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025 put the median wage for general and operations managers at $50.85 an hour, or about $105,768 a year across 3.5 million workers. Executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants, the role the chief of staff is usually contrasted against, sit at $36.82 an hour, roughly $76,586.
Against a market median of $185,000 for chief of staff postings in 2026, that is about 75% more than the median manager and roughly 2.4 times an executive assistant. For a job with no direct reports.
Run it at Microsoft’s scale. Three hundred chiefs of staff at the market median is at least $55 million a year in base salary, before equity, bonus, or benefits, at a company that cut 15,000 roles partly on the argument that it had too many layers. The staff line is not large enough to invalidate the restructuring. It is large enough to show that the savings were smaller than the headline, and that a meaningful slice of what got cut was rebought at a premium.
Every business model has a coordination cost. It is the price of getting specialized people to work on the same thing at the same time, and it scales with the number of interfaces between them, not with headcount. Deleting managers does not reduce interfaces. Splitting a company into more autonomous product teams actually increases them. The work has to land somewhere, and when the org chart no longer has a place for it, it lands on whoever is closest to the person who can still make a decision.
The second thing companies bought back is subtler. Middle management was never only a coordination layer. It was also the leadership pipeline, the place where people learned to run something before they ran something big. Cutting it hollowed out the bench. The chief of staff role, with its 2.3-year median tenure and its two-thirds promotion rate, is a bench-development program. Companies rebuilt an apprenticeship using a job that has no reports and no P&L, which trains judgment and access but not the thing managers actually learn, which is how to be accountable for other people’s output.
Note the ratio problem. One chief of staff serves one executive. A director used to develop eight or twelve. As a leadership pipeline, this does not scale, and it costs more per trainee.
Read that against how organizational structure actually allocates authority, and against Microsoft’s own functional-plus-divisional design, which centralizes decisions at the top while running product teams underneath. That configuration generates more cross-team coordination demand than a clean divisional structure would, which is exactly the shape of company that ends up needing 300 staff officers.
The Risk
Three ways this thesis could be wrong, and one way the trend breaks.
The strongest counterargument: the two populations are not the same work. A chief of staff running strategic projects, challenging groupthink, and preparing a CEO for a board meeting is doing something a regional operations manager never did. The pay gap could reflect a genuinely more valuable job rather than a repriced old one. Fair, but the substitution does not have to be one-for-one to matter. If any material share of what a chief of staff does is coordination that used to happen a layer down, the flattening savings are overstated.
The second: scale. Three hundred chiefs of staff at Microsoft is a rounding error against 228,000 employees. The trend is real and the absolute dollars are small. That is true today. It is less true if the role keeps spreading to VPs in marketing and finance, which the Times reports is already happening.
The third: attribution. Some of this is fashion, not structure. Catherine Berardi, who was chief of staff to Ariel Investments co-CEO Mellody Hobson, described executives who want one without knowing what to do with one, comparing the mood to an Oprah giveaway. Korn Ferry’s David Farris says he has watched chiefs of staff create more blockage and bottlenecks rather than fewer. A third of the people in the role do not get promoted out of it.
And the break: Bloomberg flagged it directly. The same cost-cutting and bureaucracy-reduction campaigns that created the demand can turn on the role itself. Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group, refuses to hire one, saying he does not want anyone sitting between him and his teams, and uses AI agents for meeting prep and scheduling instead. He also conceded the limit: AI helping someone do the job is different from AI replacing judgment and relationship building. Gelfond had a sharper version. His chiefs of staff know more about AI than he does. “Maybe they’ll teach me enough to replace themselves, but they haven’t done that yet.”
Quick Questions
Is a chief of staff just an expensive executive assistant? No. The pay gap is real and so is the scope difference. Clara Ma’s framing is the useful one: an assistant decides when something goes on the calendar, a chief of staff decides whether it belongs there at all. The point is that the second job is a decision-rights job, which is a management function without management authority.
Why does span of control matter so much here? Because it is the number boards and CFOs use to judge whether a reorganization worked. Any role that improves the ratio without reducing the work is an accounting improvement, not an operating one.
Does this mean flattening was a mistake? Not necessarily. Some layers genuinely added nothing. The claim is narrower: the savings were reported gross, and part of the cost came back at a higher unit price in a line item nobody tracks as management.
Who should actually hire one? Executives with real interface load, meaning many peer functions that must move together. Rascoff runs a portfolio of apps and does not want a filter. Gelfond runs 2,000 theaters in 90 countries. The interface count decides it, not the title.
Where does this show up in a P&L? It does not, cleanly. Chief of staff salaries sit in G&A alongside everything else. Nothing in external reporting separates coordination cost from administrative cost, which is precisely why the swap was easy to make and hard to notice. If you are modeling it yourself, it belongs in cost structure as a fixed operating cost that scales with executive count, not with revenue.
The Business Model Analyst Take
Nobody at these companies lied. Microsoft did reduce layers. Amazon did widen its builder ratio. Google did cut VP and manager roles by 10%. Every one of those statements is true and independently verifiable.
They just measured the thing that was easy to measure. Layers and spans are countable. Coordination load is not. So the restructurings optimized against a proxy, the proxy improved, and the underlying cost went looking for somewhere else to live. It found the executive office, where it now sits at $185,000 a head with no reports, no P&L, and a 2.3-year tenure clock.
The tell is that the demand keeps spreading downward. If the chief of staff boom were really about CEOs facing unprecedented geopolitical and AI complexity, you would not see VPs of communications hiring one. You see it because the layer beneath them is gone and somebody has to do the work.
For anyone running a company small enough to still make this choice deliberately: before you hire a chief of staff, count the interfaces. If the answer is that six functions need to move together and no one owns the seam, you have a structural problem, and a staff officer is a reasonable patch. If the answer is that you are drowning because you cut the people who used to absorb this, you did not save the money you think you saved, and a $185,000 patch is the most expensive way to find that out. Microsoft’s business model can carry $55 million of staff overhead without blinking. Yours probably cannot.
