The Org Chart Is Collapsing: Future Leaders Must Be the Glue Between Systems, Work, and People
As any seasoned leader will tell you, silos within organizations often occur. Some might call it gatekeeping, but in my experience and for my readers who are newer to leadership, it’s more often just plain self-preservation. Change makes people nervous. To stay “valuable,” or to protect themselves from being replaced when a big company swallows their small local one, individuals will hold back critical information. In short, they let others fail, so you had to call them. I’ve lived through this more than once, and trust me, the results are never pretty.
Take my early days in service. A new national account had a refrigeration line leaking—high-stakes because all eyes were on me to make this customer happy. Our lead technician, Hassan, diagnosed the problem and agreed that the line needed to be replaced. But when I asked why he hadn’t offered to fix it, his answer was, “It’ll be after hours, and I don’t work nights.” Not exactly the response you want when the customer’s freezers are melting and corporate is calling. I pulled in Trevor, a young tech eager to prove himself, and he worked tirelessly to repair the line. It was grueling but successful. Only afterward did Hassan casually mention we could’ve used flex copper and done the job in half the time.
Fast-forward to a more recent mess. Our Chemical Development Manager provided a formula for a product we hadn’t blended in a while. Seemed simple: follow the recipe, make the batch. Except this time, his “recipe” conveniently omitted one critical step, adjusting the pH to keep a key compound in solution. The result? Three hundred gallons of useless sludge, a seized pump, and a blending tank turned into a very expensive coffee table. Later (over cocktails), he admitted he’d left out the step deliberately. He felt undervalued with leadership changes and wanted to prove how essential he was.
Both examples are extreme, but the lesson is universal: silos, gatekeepers, and self-preservation instincts lurk everywhere. Sometimes it’s sales “forgetting” to mention a promise until install day. Sometimes it’s IT pushing out a new authenticator app that adds twelve clicks to everyone’s morning login. These walls between people, systems, and work are real, and as organizations flatten because of AI and there are fewer leadership roles with more responsibility, breaking them down will no longer be optional. It will be the core of leadership itself.
If those sound like messy one-offs, they’re not. They’re symptoms of a bigger problem: too many organizations run like separate kingdoms instead of one company. Sales protect sales. Ops protects ops. IT launches something because “security said so,” never mind if it breaks everyone’s workflow. And leadership? Too often stuck refereeing the fights instead of fixing the system.
That’s why the Wall Street Journal’s reporting caught my eye: some companies are already merging the Head of HR and Head of IT into one position. Think about that. The people function and the systems function are two areas that used to sit on opposite sides of the table and are now being tied together under a single leader. Why? Because the future isn’t about more bosses with fancier titles. It’s about fewer leaders with broader responsibility, capable of connecting people, systems, and work into one cohesive whole.
And here’s the real kicker: that doesn’t make leadership less important. It makes it harder. Leaders who survive in the next decade won’t be the loudest or the most technical. They’ll be the ones who can see how a decision in IT ripples through HR, how a change in process lands on the front line, and how culture either absorbs or rejects the system you’re trying to put in place. In short, leadership won’t be about guarding turf; it’ll be about tying the whole map together.
I’ve seen this play out in real time. Systems and work don’t fail in isolation—they fail when leaders don’t understand how the two interact. Back when I was running a service team, we rolled out digital reporting to replace handwritten logs. The system worked fine in the office, but in the field. Spotty Wi-Fi, cracked iPads, and techs balancing ladders on their shoulders made it a nightmare. Headquarters celebrated “real-time visibility.” The guys in the field cursed me out. Both sides were right. What we needed wasn’t a better app; we needed a leader willing to listen to the people doing the work and adapt the system around reality, not the other way around.
The same goes for people and the larger organization. I once watched a high-performing salesman tear through targets while torching everything around him. Customers got over-promised. Ops got dumped on. Culture took a nosedive. On paper, he was gold. In practice, he was gasoline. Leadership wasn’t about applauding his numbers; it was about recognizing that one person’s success can still be a net loss if it poisons the system. That lesson cost me months of recovery time and a few more gray hairs, but it stuck with me; a leader’s real job is keeping the whole machine running, not just polishing one shiny gear.
AI is only accelerating this. The WSJ piece makes it clear: traditional org charts are collapsing under the weight of AI. Companies are flattening structures, cutting middle layers, and moving toward skill-based teams instead of rigid hierarchies. Moderna is a prime example: they merged HR and IT under a Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, Tracey Franklin, who framed the shift this way—“It’s all about how work gets done.” That’s the job now. Not protecting boxes on a chart, but understanding how humans and machines, culture and systems, all fit together.
Think about what that means for the rest of us. If your leadership style depends on protecting turf, being the gatekeeper, or playing middle manager as your claim to value, you’re on borrowed time. The leaders who thrive will be system thinkers with people skills. Translators who understand the work, respect the people, and can stitch together the organization so it runs as one.
This is why the idea of flatter organizations both excites and terrifies me. Fewer leaders don’t mean fewer problems; it means fewer buffers. You can’t hide behind hierarchy when you’re the one holding both the HR playbook and the IT budget. You can’t shrug and say “that’s not my department” when your decisions ripple across every corner of the business. If you’re not willing to understand the work, respect the people, and grasp the systems that hold it all together, you’ll be exposed. And if you are willing? You’ll be one of the few leaders who add value in a world that needs less noise and more glue.
The org chart is collapsing, but leadership isn’t disappearing. It’s evolving. The question is: are you the kind of leader who holds the glue or the one who gets peeled off with the layers that no longer matter?
