Creating career growth without creating more management roles

For a long time, career growth followed a fairly predictable path: do well in your role, become a senior employee, move into management, and continue climbing from there. But as organizations grow, and especially as teams become flatter, that path does not work for everyone.

Some employees genuinely want to manage people, they enjoy coaching, developing others, setting direction, and being accountable for a team’s performance. For others, the most meaningful next step may look very different, they may want to become exceptional at their craft, take ownership of larger projects, solve more complex problems, mentor colleagues, or have a greater voice in the organization without becoming a people manager. Neither path represents more or less ambition, they are simply different ways to grow.

And for organizations, recognizing that difference is absolutely crucial as career development continues to be closely connected to retention and engagement, the challenge is how to broaden what we mean when we talk about career growth. A promotion and a new title are easy to recognize, but career growth has more than one dimension. Other forms of growth can be less visible but just as meaningful, and organizations can think about career development across six different dimensions.

1. Expertise: Getting very good at one thing

Someone goes deep in paid media, fixed operations, CRM strategy, accounting, or customer experience until they’re the person everyone else asks when something gets complicated. Companies can support this with advanced training, certifications, conferences, mentorship, harder assignments, or simply protected time to go deeper into the subject matter. Ask your employees, “What is something you would like to be known as an expert in a year from now?” Then identify one or two opportunities that would help them build that expertise.

2. Scope: Increasing what someone owns

An employee may begin with responsibility for one account and eventually manage several of the organization’s most complex accounts, or someone else might progress from supporting projects to owning them from beginning to end, in these cases their title may not change immediately, but the scope and complexity of their contribution has. Look at the employee’s current responsibilities and identify one area where they could reasonably take greater ownership over the next six months.

3. Impact: Having a greater effect on the organization

Not all growth is about doing more, an experienced employee might improve a process, identify an opportunity that saves the company time or money, create a resource that helps others perform better, or contribute their expertise to an important business decision. This is an especially valuable dimension because it encourages employees to think beyond completing tasks and toward understanding the outcomes their work creates. Give employees visibility into the broader goals behind their work, then ask, “What is one thing we could improve that would make this team more effective?” Give them the opportunity to help implement the answer.

4. Learning: Next step isn’t upward, it’s sideways

An employee in marketing might benefit from understanding sales, someone in operations might want exposure to finance, a customer-facing employee may want to learn more about the technology behind the product they support.

Cross-functional projects, job shadowing, stretch assignments, training, and temporary project ownership can all create meaningful development without requiring a new position, this kind of movement matters.  During development conversations, ask, “What part of the business would you like to understand better?”, look for one project, meeting, training opportunity, or colleague that can provide that exposure.

5. Compensation: Can’t always be tied to management growth

A highly experienced specialist may create as much, or sometimes more, value in their area of expertise as someone managing a small team. Yet in many traditional career structures, the largest increases in compensation are tied to management promotions, which can unintentionally send the message that becoming a manager is the only way to continue advancing.  Organizations do not need identical compensation structures for every career path, but they should consider whether increasing expertise, responsibility, complexity, and impact can also lead to increasing earning potential. Review whether your compensation structure rewards increasing contribution or primarily rewards increasing numbers of direct reports. If an employee became significantly more valuable in their current discipline, is there room for their compensation to grow accordingly?

6. Leadership: Leadership and management are not the same thing

Employees can lead without having direct reports, they can mentor a new colleague, lead an important project, facilitate a meeting, train the team on something they know well, represent their department in a cross-functional initiative, or become a trusted voice when decisions are being made. These experiences can also help an employee discover whether people management is something they eventually want to pursue, before making it their formal next step. Identify one opportunity for a strong individual contributor to lead something rather than someone.

Instead of asking employees where they see themselves in five years, try asking what they actually want more of in their role. What do they want to get better at? What would they like to own? Is there another part of the business they’re curious about? Would they like to mentor others, lead a project, or have more influence over decisions? And importantly, does managing people actually interest them?

The answers won’t always point toward management, and that’s okay.

A traditional career path might look like:

Specialist → Senior Specialist → Team Lead → Manager → Director

But there should also be room for someone to keep growing in their craft:

Specialist → Senior Specialist → Lead → Principal / Subject-Matter Expert

Ultimately, career development is about making sure people can see what comes next, for some, that will absolutely be management, and those employees should have the opportunity and support to become great people leaders, but someone shouldn’t have to manage a team just to feel like they’re moving forward.