The promotion that removed the skill

An organisation promoted its three best engineers to management. Within a year, two had asked to go back and the third had become a mediocre manager and stopped being an engineer at all.

The structural problem is older than any of the people involved. In many fields the only route to higher pay and status is a job that requires a different set of skills from the one being rewarded. Promotion is therefore used as a reward for excellence and functions as a change of occupation, and the two purposes work against each other. The organisation loses its best practitioner and gains an inexperienced manager, which is a worse trade than it appears, because practitioner excellence was scarce and management ability was not being developed anywhere.

The response that has spread furthest is a parallel ladder: a technical track with its own levels, titles and pay, reaching as high as the management track. Done honestly it works. Done dishonestly it produces a set of senior-sounding titles with no authority and no budget, which everyone correctly reads as a consolation prize, and the best people take the management job anyway.

The test for whether a parallel ladder is real is specific and easy to apply. Can someone on the technical track earn more than their own manager? Do they sit in the meetings where decisions are made, rather than being consulted afterwards? Is anyone on that track above the level at which the two ladders separate? If the answer to all three is no, the ladder is an organisational chart rather than a career.

The deeper point is about what a promotion is for. A system cannot use one mechanism to reward past work and to allocate future work without eventually doing one of them badly.