Corporate hierarchies are collapsing. The Great Flattening is here, as companies move toward leaner, more agile structures with fewer layers and more autonomy. As organizations face pressure to become leaner and more efficient—especially in times of economic uncertainty—layers of middle management are being trimmed or eliminated altogether. What emerges are flatter, faster-moving companies with fewer reporting lines, more direct communication, and leaner teams.
But flattening isn’t just a cost-cutting trend—it’s also a hallmark of modern, high-growth, and innovative companies. Look at organizations like Shopify, Stripe, Spotify, GitLab, and Basecamp. These companies intentionally adopt flatter structures to move faster, reduce bureaucracy, and empower teams to own outcomes. In these environments, speed and autonomy are strategic advantages.
This flattening trend raises a critical question: what happens to performance management when there are fewer managers?
Traditionally, the manager sat at the center of performance reviews. They owned the process, gave the feedback, assigned the ratings, and often made the promotion or comp decisions. But this single-source model was flawed from the start.
It was too narrow, too biased, and too often influenced by team politics. Some managers protected their fiefdoms, shielding underperformers while blocking upward mobility. Others simply lacked visibility into cross-functional impact, failing to recognize rising stars whose contributions extended beyond their immediate team.
In a flatter world—where employees work more independently, across functions, often in hybrid or remote setups—that single manager lens simply isn’t enough.
With fewer managers and more fluid team structures, performance visibility becomes a challenge. Who really knows how someone is doing if they’re contributing across squads, projects, or time zones?
In this environment, 360 assessments become the go-to tool for capturing a more complete picture of employee impact across teams, projects, and functions. In a cross-functional world, it's the only way to capture the nuance of how work gets done.
360s shine light on talent that might otherwise stay hidden. They surface feedback from those who work with or for someone, not just above them. And in a leaner company, where every hire counts, surfacing overlooked contributors is more important than ever.
Here’s the twist: most traditional 360s weren’t designed for this world either.
They’re clunky and still biased—especially when employees handpick who evaluates them. Evaluating large numbers of people becomes a logistical nightmare, and calibration still feels like a Game of Thrones episode—political, opaque, and full of behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Calibration happens in closed-door meetings. And by the time insights reach the employee, it's months too late to be useful.
In a flatter, faster, more hybrid world, 360s need to be:
The Great Flattening isn’t a blip—it’s a structural shift. And performance management has to keep up.
In this new landscape, it’s not just about who manages who. It’s about how we see each other, how we measure contribution, and how we grow talent when the org chart no longer tells the whole story.
360 feedback, reimagined for speed, clarity, and fairness, is no longer a nice-to-have. It's the performance backbone of a leaner, smarter, more connected company.
And companies that get it right won’t just survive the shift—they’ll come out stronger on the other side.
