Jeff Smith BlackRock Alum Wants Companies to Rebuild the Manager Role

Jeff Smith Middle Manager Development

Eighty-two percent of boards and chief executives plan to cut up to 20% of their workforces within the next three years because of AI, according to Korn Ferry’s CEO and board survey, and much of that reduction will come from stripping out management layers. Managers who survive the flattening inherit wider spans, more direct reports, and more complexity, often with the same generic training that failed their predecessors.

Korn Ferry’s own warning is blunt. “Eliminating middle managers and entry-level roles looks attractive on a spreadsheet, but it quietly destroys your future leadership bench,” says Roger Philby, who leads the firm’s people strategy and performance practice. Korn Ferry’s 2026 HR trends research describes the likely outcome as a hollow structure, with senior leaders at the top, machines and contractors at the bottom, and very little in between.

Jeff Smith, BlackRock’s former HR head, who spent more than a decade leading human resources there after senior roles at Time Warner and AOL, has long put manager development near the top of his priority list for HR. “Leaders need to drive change and help drive strategy and create culture,” he says. Development in his framing covers far more than succession planning. It decides whether an organization can carry the weight its org chart keeps shifting onto fewer shoulders.

The Load That Lands on the Managers Who Stay

Delayering, the removal of whole layers of management, does not remove the work of managing. It redistributes that work to whoever remains, and the remainder arrives at a difficult moment. Sixty percent of HR leaders tell Korn Ferry that economic uncertainty will have the biggest impact on their businesses in 2026, which means surviving managers absorb wider teams while budgets tighten around them.

Senior leaders feel the same squeeze from the other direction. Korn Ferry finds tactical demands creeping upward as the middle disappears, with executives spending more time on day-to-day problem-solving and less on the long-term questions they were hired to answer.

“It feels flat. It feels fast. But it’s fragile,” Philby says.

Middle managers also carry cultural freight that rarely shows up in a restructuring model. They pass down values and working norms, translate intent into practice, and hold continuity when senior ranks turn over. Removing them removes the transmission system that leadership pipelines depend on.

Why the Standard Course Fails the Job

Most manager training assumes a role that no longer exists: a stable team of six to eight people, predictable work, and time to practice. A manager overseeing fifteen people across hybrid locations while absorbing AI-driven workflow change needs something else entirely.

HR Executive’s 2026 workforce predictions anticipate the shift directly, arguing that leadership development will move toward practical enablement, including AI-assisted coaching, feedback tools, and streamlined performance processes, rather than theoretical training. Enablement treats the manager as a worker with a hard job, not a student with a knowledge gap.

“There needs to be training and cultural support to make sure you don’t just hire talent into a static and nonevolving organization,” Smith says. A course bolted onto an unchanged role changes nothing, because the role itself is what overwhelms people.

The Jeff Smith BlackRock Approach to Designing the Job Itself

Smith’s approach starts with the position rather than the person. Designing the manager role means setting spans a human can actually lead, writing expectations that match the hours available, and building incentives that pay for the work of leading people rather than treating it as unpaid overhead on top of a day job.

“Having exceptional leaders and managers is huge for the day-to-day experience and people staying in a company,” Jeff Smith, BlackRock alum, has noted. A company that under-designs the manager role is under-designing the daily experience of everyone who reports to one.

Why Strong Performers Turn the Role Down

Declining interest in management is no longer anecdotal. More than 70% of Gen Z workers prefer to remain individual contributors, and companies are delayering at the same time, leaving fewer managers overseeing larger and more complex teams.

Jeff Smith, BlackRock veteran, has made the same point for years. “Data suggests many people do not want to be leaders or managers, and people who are successful in what they are doing need a reason to take on more and different responsibilities,” he says. Refusal of the manager track is a design problem, not an ambition problem. When the role means double the meetings, diffuse accountability, and no reward beyond a title, declining it is the rational move for a strong performer.

What Real Development Looks Like

Build the role before the curriculum

Companies that develop managers well share a sequence: fix the job first, then train for it. Four design choices come up repeatedly:

• Right-sized spans: Team sizes set by the complexity of the work, with limits that protect a manager’s capacity to coach rather than just coordinate.
• Honest expectations: A written account of what the role demands, what it pays, and what success looks like, so nobody accepts it on false pretenses.
• Rewarded people work: Compensation and promotion criteria that count developing people as performance, not as a distraction from it.
• Practice with support: Stretch situations, real feedback, and coaching in the flow of work instead of an annual classroom event.

Make the investment legible to the people deciding

Workers respond when growth is visible. More than 60% of respondents to Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025 survey said they would stay in a job they hate if it offered the chance to upskill quickly, a finding that applies doubly to a manager track most people currently view as a burden.

The Bench Companies Will Wish They Had Kept

Organizations that cut the middle without rebuilding development will discover the cost on a delay. Succession options thin out, senior hires from outside get more expensive, and the cultural translation work managers once did simply stops happening.

“I think getting the basics right and executing them is far more important before you are innovating,” says Jeff Smith, BlackRock’s former HR head, and the basics here are unglamorous: a manager role designed to be doable, expectations a person can meet, and rewards that make leading people worth choosing. Companies that build that role will have a bench in three years. Companies that flatten first and develop never will be hiring their future leadership from whoever kept theirs.