Damon Boswell and Ashley Boswell explain how the spans and layers of a growing company accumulate into invisible cost — and the restructuring framework that removes the bottlenecks without breaking the team.
There is a pattern Damon Boswell has watched repeat across dozens of growing companies: the business grows, the org chart grows with it, and at some point the chart that was built to enable the business quietly becomes the thing slowing it down. The org chart is rarely designed. It accretes — a new hire here, a new manager there, a layer added to solve a problem that has since disappeared — until the structure carries far more layers and far narrower spans than the work actually requires. Organizational restructuring is not a layoff exercise dressed up as strategy. It is the discipline of reshaping the structure so that decisions, information, and accountability move through the business at the speed the strategy demands.
The research on the cost of getting this wrong is starker than most leadership teams assume. The structural problem most mid-market companies carry is what organizational designers call the hourglass: senior leaders run relatively wide spans of control, the middle of the organization narrows into layers of managers with three to six direct reports each, and frontline supervisors again manage broader teams. The narrow middle is where the bottleneck lives. Every narrow span is an approval checkpoint, a coordination role, and a layer of overhead the business pays for in both compensation and slower execution. Middle managers accounted for 29% of all layoffs in 2024 — a sharp increase over prior years — precisely because organizations are waking up to how much excess layer the middle has accumulated.
Ashley Boswell translates the structural problem into terms a leadership team can feel. Span of control and organizational layers operate in an inverse relationship: widening the span reduces the number of layers required, and narrowing the span increases the depth of the hierarchy. The consequence is measured in decision velocity. A decision that must pass through five layers of approval between the frontline and the executive team does not arrive faster because the people are capable — it arrives slower because the structure requires it to. The cost is not just the salaries of the extra layers. It is the delayed decisions, the diluted context that reaches the top, and the repeated approvals that teach the organization that nothing moves until it has been touched by everyone.
Damon Boswell structures a restructuring engagement around a spans and layers analysis — and he begins with a map of the organization as it actually operates, not as the formal chart describes it. The first step is to assess the current structure honestly: where are spans too wide, where are they too narrow, and where do layers exist without a clear purpose? The patterns that surface are remarkably consistent — overloaded managers buried under too many direct reports, underused managers supervising too few, and entire layers that function as pass-throughs rather than decision-makers. The analysis is not theoretical. It surfaces the specific points where the structure is taxing the business, and those points are where the restructuring work begins.
The second pillar is modeling scenarios before touching a single role. Ashley Boswell is insistent that restructuring is not cutting — it is redesigning. The leadership team tests different structural configurations by adjusting spans and layers and observing the impact on cost, managerial capacity, and decision speed. A wider span with fewer layers trades overhead for manager load. A narrower span preserves coaching capacity but adds coordination cost. There is no universal ideal — the right configuration depends on the complexity of the work, the maturity of the team, and the speed the strategy requires. The discipline is to model the trade-offs deliberately rather than inherit the structure the business happened to build.
The third pillar is the one Damon Boswell argues determines whether the restructuring sustains: manager effectiveness. Gallup's 2025 global workplace report found that employee engagement dropped from 23% to 21% — only the second decline in twelve years — driven largely by falling manager engagement, at an estimated cost of $438 billion in lost productivity. The structural lesson is direct. When spans and layers are misaligned, managers have less time to coach, develop, and support the people who actually do the work, and engagement erodes from the manager outward. A restructuring that widens spans without giving managers the capacity to lead the larger team has not reduced overhead. It has simply relocated the cost from the salary line to the productivity line, where it is far harder to see and far more expensive to fix.
The fourth pillar is the change management that restructuring demands, and Ashley Boswell is candid that it is the step most often skipped. A restructure announced from the top and imposed on the team produces compliance and resentment in equal measure. The teams that restructure cleanly are the ones whose leadership engages the affected managers in the redesign — naming the problem the structure is solving, explaining the trade-offs, and giving the people whose roles change the context to understand why. Restructuring is a strategy decision, but it lands as a people decision, and the people who have to live in the new structure have to understand it before they can perform in it.
The measurement layer is what makes organizational restructuring defensible rather than theoretical. Damon Boswell tracks four metrics together: the average span of control by level (to catch the narrow middle), the number of layers between the frontline and the executive team (to catch the decision-distance tax), the manager-to-employee ratio (to catch overhead imbalance), and manager engagement and retention (to catch whether the new structure is sustainable). A widening span with stable engagement is a restructure that worked. A widening span with collapsing engagement is a cost saving that is quietly destroying capability. Read together, these metrics tell the leadership team whether the structure is now enabling the strategy or whether the next round of growth has already outgrown it.
Organizational restructuring is not an event triggered by a downturn. It is a structural discipline that a growing business practices before the structure becomes the constraint on the growth it was built to support. Damon Boswell and Ashley Boswell help leadership teams read their own org chart honestly, redesign the spans and layers around the work the strategy actually requires, and install the change management that makes the new structure hold — because the businesses that out-execute their competitors are often the ones whose structure lets decisions move at the speed of the market instead of the speed of the hierarchy. That is the work, and it is the work Blueprint Business Advisors was built to do.
