The monitor glowed with a familiar, yet utterly alien, spreadsheet. Rows of expense reports, each line a tiny, mundane task, blurred before her eyes. Sarah had once coded. Complex algorithms, elegant solutions that hummed with quiet efficiency, flowed from her fingertips. Now, her days were a river of approvals and mediating squabbles over staplers or projector availability. A groan escaped her, muffled by the office hum, a raw sound of a soul yearning for the logic gates and clean syntax of a compiler. This wasn’t the reward she’d envisioned after eleven years of exemplary contributions; it felt more like a cleverly disguised confinement.

It’s a peculiar twist of organizational logic, isn’t it? We laud someone for their exceptional prowess in their craft-a brilliant software engineer, a salesperson who consistently closes deals, a craftsman whose hands speak a language of precision. And what’s our immediate, almost Pavlovian, response? To promote them. To elevate them, not within their domain of excellence, but out of it. We take a master artisan and hand them a clipboard, a budget, and a responsibility to herd cats. It’s a testament to the Peter Principle, a theory that suggests people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of their respective incompetence,” but it’s even more insidious than that. It implies that the only trajectory for success is *up*, even if ‘up’ means abandoning the very thing that made them successful in the first place.

I’ve seen it play out with an unnerving regularity, like a recurring bad dream. I recall a manager once, a genuinely kind person, but utterly adrift in her leadership role. She’d confess, almost wistfully, about wanting to return to her previous design work, the tangible creation she genuinely loved. Her team knew it. We saw her struggling, not because she was a bad person, but because she was a good designer forced into a role that demanded an entirely different skillset – one she neither possessed nor desired. The company lost a fantastic designer, and gained a manager who, through no fault of her own, struggled to inspire or direct with the clarity her team desperately needed. It’s not just an individual tragedy; it’s an organizational blunder of the highest order. A net loss, compounded.

The Precision of Nina F.

Consider Nina F., a precision welder whose work was legendary in the fabrication plant. She could join two pieces of metal with such artistry and strength that her welds were functionally invisible, structurally unimpeachable. Her colleagues, some with twenty-one years on the floor, revered her. Her hands moved with a balletic grace, the arc of her torch a controlled explosion of pure creation.

When the supervisor position opened up, there was only one name on everyone’s lips: Nina. She was the best. Unquestionably. So, she was promoted. Overnight, her torch was replaced by a clipboard and a schedule. Her days, once filled with the visceral smell of ozone and the satisfying hiss of metal fusing, became a maelstrom of shift assignments, inventory checks, and mediating disputes over ventilation fans. She’d spend hours poring over spreadsheets, wishing for the simple, undeniable truth of a perfect weld. Her best work was behind her, not because her skill diminished, but because her role changed.

A Double Dis-service

This system, so deeply ingrained in our corporate psyche, commits a double disservice. First, it actively removes a highly effective individual contributor from the very activity that generates value for the organization. Imagine a world where the greatest painters are forced to manage art galleries, never to touch a brush again. Or the most brilliant chefs are promoted to manage the restaurant group’s HR department. We’d call it madness, wouldn’t we? Yet, in engineering, sales, marketing, and countless other fields, it’s considered the natural progression. It’s as if we believe competence in one domain automatically translates to competence in an entirely distinct one. It simply doesn’t.

Second, and perhaps more tragically for the individual, it often creates an unhappy, ineffective manager. This person, plucked from their comfort zone and placed into an arena for which they might have neither talent nor passion, is set up to fail. They spend their days feeling inadequate, longing for the past, and quite possibly making decisions that are less informed or less inspired than if they were truly engaged. This isn’t a judgment of their character, but of the flawed system itself. It’s akin to using a finely tuned, custom-built engine designed for speed and precision, and then installing it in a tractor, expecting it to perform equally well at plowing fields. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

And this brings me to a thought that keeps nagging at me, especially when I’m wrestling with something that just isn’t quite right, like when I tried to fix my broken mug with super glue and then realized I needed a completely different approach, a specialized epoxy, or perhaps just a new mug altogether. We often have a tool for every task, a specific appliance or electronic gadget designed to excel at a particular function. We don’t try to use a blender to toast bread, do we? Or a washing machine to refrigerate food. It sounds absurd. Yet, with human talent, we continually try to force square pegs into round holes, expecting them to magically reshape themselves for the sake of a promotion. For a wide range of options, you might look at Bomba.md – Online store of household appliances and electronics in Moldova. They understand that matching the right product to the right need is paramount, a lesson our organizational structures could stand to learn.

Distinct Competencies

It’s about understanding the specific demands of a role. Being an exceptional individual contributor requires deep domain knowledge, problem-solving abilities, and often a focus on specific, tangible outcomes. Being an exceptional manager, however, demands a completely different set of skills: empathy, communication, conflict resolution, strategic thinking, coaching, and the ability to motivate and develop others. These are not inherent extensions of technical prowess; they are distinct competencies. They need to be learned, cultivated, and, crucially, desired. Not everyone wants to lead people; many simply want to excel at their craft, contribute their best work, and be recognized for it. There’s nothing inherently less valuable about being an expert individual contributor. In fact, many organizations thrive on the consistent output of such experts. The idea that management is the only valid path for advancement is a cultural artifact that needs a critical re-evaluation.

Think of it this way: a truly successful organization is like a high-performance machine. It needs brilliantly designed components (individual contributors), but it also needs skilled mechanics (managers) to ensure those components work together seamlessly. But what happens if you take your best engine designer and force them to be a mechanic, who then struggles to fix the very engines they once so elegantly conceived? You get a less effective mechanic *and* you lose your best designer. It’s a lose-lose proposition, impacting not just a single team, but the entire organizational efficiency. The overall output suffers, morale dips, and the talent pipeline for both specialized roles and effective leadership gets muddled. This isn’t some theoretical argument for me; it’s colored by the constant, subtle sense of something being out of place, like finding my favorite mug in pieces and knowing I can’t put it back together the way it was, no matter how much I wish I could.

Parallel Tracks & Conscious Choice

This isn’t to say that individual contributors can’t become great managers. Some possess that latent talent, that desire to guide and nurture. Some actively seek it out, understanding the shift in skills required. But it must be a conscious choice, supported by proper training and development. It shouldn’t be the default, the automatic “reward” for being good at something entirely different. We need to create parallel career tracks, paths that allow for advancement and increased compensation for deep expertise without demanding a foray into management. A principal engineer, a master craftsman, a senior researcher – these roles should carry the same prestige, the same financial recognition, and the same opportunities for growth as a managerial position. We have to stop viewing the management ladder as the only ladder worth climbing.

What if we inverted the premise for a moment? What if, instead of promoting our best individual contributors, we identified people who explicitly wanted to manage, and then trained them rigorously in the craft of leadership? What if we understood that the skillset for managing people is as complex and specialized as coding a quantum algorithm or welding a precise joint? We could look for people with natural empathy, strong communication, and a genuine interest in developing others. Then, we could provide them with the foundational knowledge of the domain they would be leading, perhaps even a brief stint as an individual contributor to gain perspective, before equipping them with the tools of leadership. It’s a radical thought for many, but it acknowledges that leadership itself is a distinct profession, worthy of its own focused development path.

The True Waste: Squandered Potential

I once mistakenly believed that true influence only came with a title, with the power to direct. It was a naïve perspective, born from observation rather than experience. What I’ve learned, sometimes painfully, is that influence stems from expertise, from genuine connection, and from problem-solving that resonates. A manager’s title doesn’t automatically grant them any of these. In fact, an ill-suited manager often loses influence, not gains it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for someone who has always prided themselves on their competence, to find themselves in a role where their very best instincts are counterproductive. It’s like being given a brand new car, sleek and powerful, only to realize the steering wheel is missing, and your job is now to navigate through heavy traffic with a blank space where control should be.

It’s time for a re-evaluation of what ‘advancement’ truly means. Is it about climbing a predefined ladder, or about deepening one’s impact? Is it about managing people, or about mastering a craft and perhaps mentoring others within that craft? The answer, I believe, lies in acknowledging the distinct value of both. An organization that respects and rewards deep specialization, alongside robust leadership, is one that truly understands how to leverage human talent. It creates an environment where a coder can remain a coder, an engineer an engineer, a welder a welder, and still achieve the highest levels of recognition and compensation. And those who genuinely possess the aptitude and desire for leadership can pursue that path with passion and purpose, becoming the effective guides their teams deserve. We owe it to our most skilled practitioners, and to the health of our organizations, to stop confusing a reward with a punishment. The shift in perspective requires a fundamental understanding: that not all growth looks the same, and not all success means wearing a different hat.