Two reasons:

1. Managers make more massively multiplied meetings mandatory. The more layers of management you have, the more meetings you’ll need to have in order to keep everyone more or less rowing the the same direction. It doesn’t take much management before the meetings start to overwhelm the work.

2. Agency cost. Team leaders tend to care about the work, and in cases where they don’t, it’s usually obvious enough that they can be easily fired. Corporate officers tend to care about the health of the business, and likewise, if they don’t, it shows and they can be sacked forthwith. Middle managers, on the other hand, can all too easily become distracted by empire-building and other such activities that benefit the manager at the expense of the work and the business. And while it’s generally obvious that a company has begun to suffer from an excess of bureaucracy, it’s much harder to locate the perpetrators and get rid of them.

At least in a small place, I don’t usually have to go through three meetings to accomplish something, though many of my best ideas don’t happen because the leadership is . . . a little slow to innovate, to put it kindly.