1-2-1: Your org chart is behind

A peer mentoring group I sit with is now 80% senior individual contributors. Five years ago it would have been the reverse.

These are people who ran teams and chose to go back to doing the work.

1 Principle

Experienced individual contributors have become more valuable than junior managers, and most org charts still say the opposite.

The manager role exists to multiply output by coordinating people. A good chunk of that coordination is now done by software. What's held its value is judgement built over fifteen years of doing the work, which stays scarce and stays expensive. The worth shifted. Your pay bands, titles and progression ladders were drawn before it did.

2 Things Top of Mind

#1 The peer group that inverted

I watched this happen among a group of ex-big-tech leaders. 80% of them are now senior ICs, and several stepped down from managing to get there, taking the title change to do it. When I asked one of them why, the answer was blunt: managing four people used to be leverage, and now it's overhead. The same people are being asked to carry two to four times the reports they had before, while the work that made them good is the work they've stopped doing.

This week: Look at your last three promotions. For each one, ask whether you moved that person into management because they wanted to lead, or because it was the only route you had to pay them more.

#2 The promotion you're about to get wrong

You've got someone brilliant. The obvious next step is a team. You've run the numbers on the band, you've drafted the announcement. The thing you've skipped is whether they want it, or whether they'll say yes because the alternative is staying where they are on the same money for another two years. Six months later you've lost your best practitioner and gained an anxious manager.

This week: Ask your strongest individual contributor one question. "If the pay was identical, would you rather run a team or go deeper at what you do?" Then sit with the answer before you act on it.

1 Question

Who on your team would you lose if the only way up is through management?