Organizational flattening may well be the most talked-about business trend of the year. At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy is focused on increasing the company’s builder ratio (individual contributors/managers) by 15 percent. Dell is also eliminating management roles, moving to a structure where all vice presidents have 15 or more direct reports, and directors and senior managers have 20+.
Outside of technology, companies like Target are downsizing because of “too many layers and overlapping work.” The German life-sciences company Bayer AG has been one of the most aggressive companies on this front. In a recently published Harvard Business School case, we write about CEO Bill Anderson’s decision to eliminate 5,500 (out of 7,800) management positions across the company, increasing managers’ span of control to as high as 1:50 in some areas.
While much of the discussion around flattening has focused on middle management roles, the C-suite has not been immune. After years of growth, C-suites are shrinking. According to a SHRM study, between 1990 and 2023, the average size of the C-suite, excluding the CEO, grew by 160 percent. While specialist C-suite roles, such as chief data and chief revenue officer, saw the highest growth rates, nearly all C-suite roles grew over this period. However, over the past few years, this growth trend has been reversing. Per SHRM’s data, excluding the CEO, the number of C-suite executives declined by 4.7 percent in 2023 relative to 2022.
C-Suite Trends Among Leading Global Companies
We wanted to understand how the shrinking C-suite trend was playing out at the largest companies globally. To do this, we utilized The Official Board’s database to analyze the C-suites at Fortune Global 500 companies. Specifically, we looked at N-1 roles (direct reports to the CEO) at these companies in 2022 and in 2025. (It is worth noting that the database at The Official Board is compiled using publicly available information, and complete organization chart information is not always available.)
The Fortune Global 500 is comprised of the largest 500 companies (by revenue) globally. In aggregate, the constituents of the Fortune Global 500 generated $41.7 trillion in 2024 revenues and $3 trillion in profits and employed 70.1 million people. For 12 consecutive years, Walmart has been the number one company globally. Based on data supplied by The Official Board, the average number of N-1 executives across Fortune Global 500 companies declined by 9 percent between 2022 and 2025, decreasing from an average of 12.0 to 10.9.
All sectors except transportation saw the average number of N-1 roles decline between 2022 and 2025, with the largest decline occurring at finance companies.
On a regional basis, Europe, Middle East & Africa, or EMEA, (-17 percent) and North America (-13 percent) saw double-digit declines in the average number of N-1 executives between 2022 and 2025. Asia Pacific and Latin America saw a slight increase (see chart on p.17).
We also looked at the trend in N-1 roles among the largest 10 companies in the Fortune Global 500 ranking. Here, the declining size of the average C-suite was even more noticeable. Overall, the average number of N-1 executives across this group of largest companies declined by 15 percent between 2022 and 2025, from 13.3 to 11.3.
Finally, we looked at the change in specific C-suite roles. Several newer C-suite roles, most notably in the area of technology, have continued to increase in prevalence (see chart, below right). However, other C-suite roles declined. For example, the number of Global Fortune 500 companies with a chief marketing officer declined by 13 percent between 2022 and 2025. (Per the SHRM study, the percentage of companies with CMOs peaked in 2021.)
UPS was one company that eliminated this role. When its CMO left in late 2023, his responsibilities were reassigned to the company’s chief commercial and strategy officer. Johnson & Johnson, Walgreens and Hyatt also eliminated the CMO role in recent years. Executive Search Consultant Evan Sharp, of Russell Reynolds Associates, argued that the trend away from appointing a CMO reflected an emphasis on new data-driven ways of interacting with customers.
After Years of Growth, What Is Driving This Change?
First, it is worth noting that not all companies have bought into the smaller is better trend when it comes to the C-suite. Jensen Huang, CEO of the global chip company Nvidia, is a firm believer in having a large C-suite. At the DealBook Summit, Huang, who has upward of 36 direct reports, maintained that the “more direct reports the CEO has, the less layers are in the company…It allows us to keep information fluid, allows us to make sure that everyone is empowered by information.”
Huang argued the CEO should have more direct reports than anyone in the organization because a C-suite executive “requires the least amount of management.” And he contended that companies are often motivated to operate with a small C-suite because they want to keep certain elements of company management secret from the rest of the organization.
Huang explained to Stanford Graduate School of Business: “I don’t believe in a culture, in an environment where the information that you possess is the reason why you have power. I would like us all to contribute to the company.”
In a conversation with Stripe, Mark Zuckerberg shared that while not all of them are technically his direct reports, he thinks of Meta’s core management team as a group of 25-30 executives. He meets with this group twice weekly—once for “an open-ended kind of strategy discussion” and a second time for an operational meeting where company priorities are reviewed.
For companies who have shrunk their senior teams, this C-suite contraction has been driven by several factors. Some organizations have downsized their senior teams with a view to becoming more agile, responsive and better aligned. In October 2024, Georges Elhedery, the CEO of the global bank HSBC, announced that his senior management team would be reduced from 18 executives to 12. The move was part of a broader restructuring designed to “reduce the duplication of processes and decision making that are built into the current structure” and “result in greater alignment and agility in serving” customers.
The shrinking C-suite has also been a function of cost-cutting. In 2025, Southwest Airlines announced it would be eliminating 15 percent of corporate jobs in order to cut annual expenses by $300 million. This reduction included the elimination of 11 senior executive roles, 15 percent of Southwest’s senior management committee.
Other corporations are using intermediary roles, such as chief operating officer or chief administrative officer, to oversee numerous functional groups, rather than having the heads of those groups report directly to the CEO. At American Express, executive committee member Denise Pickett holds the title of president of Enterprise Shared Services and oversees a range of functions, including real estate, supply management and security. At Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella appointed Carolina Dybeck Happe (formerly CFO of GE) as COO, Microsoft’s first COO in nearly eight years. Dybeck Happe manages multiple groups including the Digital IT team and Microsoft Business Operations.
C-suite executives are increasingly expected to be “utility players,” with broad cross-functional skills rather than narrow specialist focus. (This is a reversal of the trend of increasing specialization in C-suite roles, which was evident over the prior 30 years.) According to a study by Deloitte, the number of skills that Fortune 500 companies were asking C-suite executives to bring to their role increased between 2018 and 2023. For example, the average number of requisite skills listed in CFO postings increased by 19 percent (from 12.5 to 14.9), and the number of skills listed in postings for COOs and CHROs increased by 19 percent and 25 percent respectively.
Faced with a highly dynamic and competitive market, many CEOs are dedicating more time to thinking about, setting and executing strategy. “The role of the CEO is basically to figure out and decide what the company should do and then make sure it does that…the CEO has to drive the company’s overall direction,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview with entrepreneur Elad Gil, arguing that strategy is one task that CEOs cannot delegate.
Spending more time on strategy generally means spending less time on other tasks, and one way to facilitate this shift is to reduce the amount of time a CEO spends managing by shrinking their team. In Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Creator by Marcia Amidon Lusted, Zuckerberg was quoted as saying: “The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’”
There is an endless list of important things that a CEO can spend their time on. The trick is understanding which of those is the most important and ensuring that they are giving enough time to that.
Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit and Sarah Abbott is a research associate, both at Harvard Business School.
