In a corporate environment, progress and seniority are often intertwined with managing people. The higher up you are in an organization, the more people you typically have reporting to you, and the more careers and livelihoods you hold in your hands.
But managing others is a wholly different skill than honing a specific talent—or doing the work that likely got you promoted in the first place. Yet these high-performing employees often find themselves promoted into managerial positions, only to realize later that perhaps managing people isn’t something they particularly enjoy or are very good at.
But career success doesn’t have to mean seniority and a promotion, says Helen Tupper, cofounder of Amazing If, a company that works with organizations to help people succeed in nonlinear career paths. And leaving a managerial role doesn’t always have to mean a dip in income. Tupper says there are ways to curate your career, so you can end up financially better off.
If you’ve been climbing the corporate ladder and are questioning whether being a people manager is right for you in the long term, consider taking the following steps:
Be honest with yourself
First, it’s important to acknowledge when something isn’t making you happy. Tupper says she’d only met one person who admitted to himself that he didn’t like being a manager, so he returned to being an individual contributor. “I don’t hear a lot of honest reflection,” she says. Instead, she hears a lot of stress and frustration around being pulled in many different directions and not being able to develop themselves because people management is “getting in the way.”
Jillian Knowles, a career coach and former campus recruiter who hired graduates for manager development programs, echoes this sentiment. Many people are afraid to admit when they don’t like people management because they think it might mean going backward in their career, she says, or that they’re somehow inferior to their peers, when this is not the case.
“Being a manager is a particular role,” she says. “If you’re desiring to guide people and step into more responsibility, there are other ways to do it without being a people manager—and it doesn’t mean that you’re doing your job less well than someone else.”
Identify your motivations
The next step is to ask yourself what it is that motivates you and what you consider to be career success. Is it more money? Status? Responsibility? Let’s assume money is your main priority, Tupper says. A possible path is transitioning into another nonmanagerial role in another function that pays more. Sales, for example, will often have higher levels of remuneration than many departments in an organization, because there is typically a built-in bonus structure. Someone in marketing may have skills that are transferable to a sales role, so it’s worth considering a lateral move.
In her work, Tupper runs sessions that require attendees to map out as many ways as possible to progress within their organization. “Promotion is the obvious one,” she says, but there’s also taking on more responsibilities, working on a specific project, getting a mentor, being a mentor, and participating in secondments. (Secondments is a practice of taking a temporary position in another department—either within an organization or in another company. It’s especially common in professional services, where employees are often “seconded” to a client’s organization.)
At the end of the session, she asks the attendees, “Which one of those progression possibilities feels closest to you right now? “Ninety percent of the time,” she says, “it isn’t a promotion.”
Make a realistic assessment of where you’re currently at
Once you’ve figured out some possible career paths, it’s time to assess that against your skills and experience. If you want to stay at your organization and there are no open roles that interest you, it might be worth speaking to who you currently report to and seeing if you can carve out a new role. Both Tupper and Knowles have seen their clients do this and succeed.
“If you’re a high performer and the company derives a lot [of] value from you, it is going to cost them so much to find a replacement for you that was operating with that ‘it’ factor,” Knowles says. However, “if you’re not a high performer, or you have areas that you could be working on, you cannot expect that the company is going to take that risk on you.”
Create your own opportunities
Perhaps you don’t want to stay at your current company, and there are no open nonmanagerial roles that interest you. It might be time to tap into your networks and create your own opportunities.
This is precisely what Sarah Doody did. A UX designer and researcher by trade, she quit her startup job to start her own UX design and research agency. “I knew I didn’t want to go into management,” she says, “and I grew the agency until I came to a crossroads because I thought the only way to increase my earning potential was to do more work, but to do so, I needed to hire a team.”
She decided to “scale her time” instead. She started developing online courses that turned into her current business, Career Strategy Lab, which provides courses, tutorials, and training sessions for UX designers and tech professionals to grow their careers. “I do have a small team of contractors from time to time,” Doody says. “[But] we have our operations so dialed in that I barely need to manage people, and instead, I’m managing projects.”
Adopt a mindset of career curiosity rather than control
Lastly, Tupper recommends that when it comes to your career, you should adopt a mindset of curiosity rather than control. We all know the person who tries to control their careers by planning for everything in advance, she says, because doing so makes them feel comfortable. However, if you have this mindset, “you’re going to get frustrated because you can’t control everything,” she says.
“I think it’s much healthier [to have] career curiosity than career control,” she says. That means looking for career opportunities in every role and asking questions like “Who can I learn from? What roles are going to help me learn new skills? What projects are going to help me learn about myself?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do in the next five to ten years,” Tupper says. “But what I do know is what I’m good at and enjoy doing, and I can use that to direct my development.”
“Don’t pick your roles based on level,” she urges. “Pick based on learning, and you will never fail.”
