The best engineer on the team just stopped engineering. She was promoted on Friday; by Monday her calendar was meetings, her editor was closed, and the thing she was demonstrably better at than anyone else in the building had become, officially, no longer her job. The company calls this a reward.
It is worth pausing on how strange that is. In almost no other domain do we reward mastery by removing it. A surgeon who excels is given harder surgeries, not a budget spreadsheet. A striker who scores is not made the club accountant. Yet in the standard corporate design, the only ladder that leads to more money, more status and more voice is the one that climbs away from the craft.
One prize, wrongly shaped
The problem is not that management is unworthy work. It is that management is offered as the only prize, so people take it for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to manage. They take it for the raise, for the title, for the signal to the market, or simply because refusing looks like a lack of ambition. The organization then loses twice: it subtracts its strongest practitioner from the work, and it installs someone in a people role who never asked for people.
The evidence on what awaits them is not encouraging. Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey, covering nearly 10,000 business and HR leaders in 93 countries, found that managers spend close to 40% of their time on administrative tasks and firefighting, and only 13% actually developing the people on their teams. In the same research, 36% of managers said they feel unprepared for the people-management part of the role. So the promoted craftsman gives up the craft and does not even receive, in exchange, the human work that supposedly justified the move. She receives coordination overhead.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 adds the emotional ledger: manager engagement worldwide fell to 22%, down nine percentage points since 2022, the steepest drop of any employee group. The chair everyone is climbing toward is occupied by people who, in growing numbers, do not want to be sitting in it.
The rut called career
Ricardo Semler likes to point out that the word "career" comes from the track a carriage wheel cuts into the road: a single rut, running in one direction. As he has told it, that is precisely what the conventional promotion path is, a groove you cannot steer out of without the maneuver being read as failure. Once management is framed as "up," any return to the craft is framed as "down," and people will cling to a role that makes them miserable rather than accept the framing.
McKinsey's State of Organizations research (2023) offers a cold estimate of where this logic leads: in many organizations, 20 to 30 percent of critical roles are not filled by the most appropriate people. Some of that mismatch is hiring. But a reliable share of it is manufactured internally, every time a company converts its best practitioner into its newest administrator because it had no other way to say thank you.
What a better reward looks like
The fix is conceptually simple and organizationally hard: make excellence rewardable in place. That means senior ranks, senior pay and real institutional voice that do not require direct reports; it means measuring seniority by the difficulty of the problems someone owns rather than the number of humans who report to them; and it means treating a move into management as a lateral change of profession, chosen by people who actually want it, rather than the default trophy.
None of this argues that managers are useless. It argues that "manager" should be a vocation with its own selection criteria, not the prize bin into which all other vocations are emptied. An organization that can only reward a great designer by ending her design career has not built an incentive system. It has built a machine for converting its scarcest asset into its most common complaint.
The test is easy to run. Ask your strongest individual contributor what happens to her pay and status if she keeps doing exactly what she does best for the next decade. If the honest answer is "they stall," the promotion trap is set, and it will eventually catch her.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Managers report spending ~40% of time on admin and firefighting and only 13% developing people; 36% feel unprepared for people management. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Manager engagement fell to 22%, down nine points since 2022, the sharpest decline of any group. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- McKinsey (2023). The State of Organizations 2023. In many organizations 20-30% of critical roles are not filled by the most appropriate people. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023