Goodbye, middle managers. Hello, 'player-coaches' and 'org leads.'

• Meta is rebranding some managers as "org leads." Block is calling them "player-coaches," as both companies lean into AI.
• Top-down control can hinder innovation, former Netflix chief talent officer Patty McCord told Business Insider.
• Eliminating hierarchies hasn't always paid off, as online retailer Zappos learned in the 2010s.

Large companies have spent years culling middle managers. Now, two marquee employers are redefining some of those roles and handing off work to AI.

Meta Platforms last month began giving employees in its Reality Labs unit one of three new job titles — "AI builder," "pod lead," or "org lead," as part of a push to become "AI-native."

Payments company Block is also scrubbing the "m-word" from its hierarchy. Managers are becoming "player-coaches" who build alongside their teams, while "individual contributors" use AI tools to inform their own decisions instead of waiting to be told what to do.

Businesses have long reorganized around disruptive technologies, from the internet to mobile computing. For some, AI is the latest catalyst.

Removing dedicated middle managers and offloading part of their work to AI is unconventional — and reminiscent of Zappos' holacracy experiment in the 2010s. Block CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed an eventual desire to eliminate all managerial layers.

Yet, for now, Meta and Block's rebranding may be less dramatic, as some of the new descriptions still reference human oversight and support.

Sometimes when companies rethink jobs, there isn't a "real structural change," said Chris Kaufman, a cofounder of the e-commerce giant StockX and a leadership consultant. "It's more like moving the peas to the corn compartment in a TV dinner," he said.

No layers at all

The reorgs happening at Meta and Block are an extension of a years-long trend of companies trimming their managerial ranks in the name of speed and efficiency. Employers advertised 12.3% fewer middle-manager jobs in 2025 than in 2024, according to job site Indeed. (Listings overall also declined.)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call in January that the company was investing in more AI-native tools to help flatten its structure.

"We're starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person," he said.

AI is a key driver. In its Reality Labs unit, for example, Meta's org leads handle reviews and promotions with support from AI systems, Business Insider previously reported.

Block's Dorsey and Sequoia partner Roelof Botha laid out their vision for a fully flat future in a blog post published Tuesday. "There is no need for a permanent middle management layer," they wrote. "Everything else the old hierarchy did, the system coordinates."

On an episode of Sequoia Capital's "Long Strange Trip" podcast published Thursday, Dorsey said that he aims to reduce the number of layers between the company's 6,000 employees and himself this year to two or three, down from about five. The "most ideal case," he added, would be to have no layers at all. "Everyone in the company reports to me," Dorsey said.

Meta declined to comment and Block didn't respond to a request for comment.

Shifting to small, cross-functional teams can help companies innovate more quickly by bringing together employees with complementary skills, said Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor and cofounder of the AI-driven software startup InnovationForce. However, they also need what she calls "bridgers," human leaders who can help those teams collaborate.

"You rarely get innovation without diversity of thought and expertise," said Hill.

Companies may be able to get by with fewer workers now that AI can automate many tasks, and some, including Block, have said as much to justify layoffs. Yet fully offloading managers' responsibilities to AI simply isn't practical, said Patty McCord, the former Netflix chief talent officer who helped rethink traditional management structures through its famous "culture deck," a slide presentation advocating fewer managers and more autonomy.

"AI is not going to take humans out of the equation," she said. Instead, "it's going to take some tasks out, just like factories did."

The dangers of micromanaging

Unorthodox hierarchies can backfire. Zappos' move more than a decade ago to eliminate hierarchy and empower workers ultimately unraveled in practice. The experiment, which ditched manager roles and job titles in favor of "self-management," notoriously created ambiguity and a lack of accountability among the online retailer's workforce. A few hundred employees subsequently quit.

"People always will need clarity on decision rights and accountability," said Kaufman.

Zappos' experiment, however, wasn't tied to a major technological shift, whereas Meta and Block are responding to today's highly advanced agentic and generative AI tools.

Straying from traditional workforce structures might not make sense for some companies. Makers of medical devices, for example, typically need rigid structures because the cost of human error is too high, said McCord.

Shaking up hierarchies, however, can and has worked for others, like Netflix. And at this moment, traditional top-down control may be less effective for software companies like Meta and Block since AI's full potential remains unknown, said McCord.

"The last thing you want when you're innovating is micromanagement," she said. "It's the antithesis of innovation."

That's especially important to keep in mind when dealing with a technology that's not yet fully understood, such as AI, McCord added.

"You really don't want to have people who are over-controlling. They could be wrong."

Driving organizational change of any kind requires more than just revamping job titles and descriptions, said Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business who researches and teaches organizational function and malfunction. Companies also need to set new performance goals and new ways to measure and reward success.

"It's all about implementation," Pozner said. Otherwise, "people are just going to do the same things that they've always done."