Leadership Minute: Management Is Not For Everyone

When management is the only path to advancement you offer, you're going to end up with a lot of reluctant, ineffective managers

One of the most important responsibilities of leadership is to make sure the right people are in the right roles at the right time. Doing this requires leaders to understand what people excel at and—perhaps more importantly—what they truly want.

However, many organizations frequently fail at this by forcing strong individual contributors into leadership roles that don’t match their skills, or aren’t the jobs they actually want. 

Too many companies have an established norm that the only path to advancement requires becoming a manager or even leading a team. However, this isn’t the right path for a lot of people. Some of the biggest mistakes I have seen in my career involved promoting brilliant engineers into engineering managers, great salespeople into sales leaders and tactical marketers into marketing leaders. In each case, these mistakes create disastrous results for both the company and the individual.

Leadership is a unique skill, and it involves a totally different barometer for success than an individual contributor role. As a leader, your day is much less about you and your work, and more focused on cultivating a team. Many strong individual contributors who are excellent at what they do don’t have the skill set or desire to be a leader and only want to be accountable for the work they do themselves. Despite this, they might take a management role because they don’t see another way to advance.

Forcing strong individual contributors into management roles is a true a no-win scenario—the individual contributor gets stuck with a manager role they don’t enjoy, their direct reports aren’t managed well, and the company trades an excellent individual contributor for a subpar manager.

The onus is leaders to help their employees find the right path for them. Fortunately, there are options available to create strong individual contributor and manager paths, and route people into each based on their skills and goals.

Make The Choice Clear For Employees

It’s important to give employees a clear choice—while they certainly can aspire to lead a team, they need to understand what they’re taking on, and what they’re giving up.

I recommend asking any individual contributor who thinks they want to be a manager a simple question: “if I took all your core job responsibilities away from you and told you that you couldn’t do them anymore, would you be ok with that? Also, you’ll have twice as many meetings instead.”

An ace salesperson often misses the high of closing a deal, and an excellent programmer might realize they will miss writing code all day. But people don’t think in these terms when contemplating stepping into management, so it’s vital to clarify the tradeoff for them and ensure they’re ready for that change. While some individual contributors want to change the nature of their work to something more managerial, don’t take that as a given.

But what if there was a way to offer growth opportunities without forcing them into management? Here are four strategies to make that happen.