Company: Meridian Software (fictitious), a mid-sized product engineering company with 1,400 employees, building enterprise software solutions for clients across manufacturing, logistics and financial services.
Background
Meera Pillai has been with Meridian Software for four years. By most internal measures, she is one of the strongest individual contributors in the engineering function.
Her technical assessments are consistently among the highest in her cohort. Her peers treat her as the person to call when a problem becomes difficult. Over the past two years, she has played a central role in three of the company’s most demanding client projects.
When a team-lead position opened up eighteen months ago, HR and her manager were aligned. Meera was the obvious choice.
She declined.
Her reasoning was clear. She enjoys solving difficult technical problems. She finds deep specialisation more rewarding than coordination and oversight. She does not want to spend her time managing conflict, conducting one-on-ones or gradually moving away from the work that energises her.
She was not uncertain about the opportunity.
She simply did not want it.
HR noted the decision and moved on.
Six months ago, another leadership opportunity arose. This time, her manager had a longer conversation with her. He explained the greater visibility the role would bring, the influence she could exercise and the compensation uplift that would accompany it.
Meera listened carefully.
She declined again.
After that conversation, her manager raised a concern with HR. Was Meera limiting herself? Was she making a considered long-term career choice, or rejecting a kind of responsibility she had never actually experienced?
Meera, meanwhile, had begun wondering something else. Why did Meridian keep treating her choice as a problem to be solved?
HR now has to decide what growth should look like for one of its strongest employees when the path the organisation considers upward is not the path she wants to take.
The dilemma
Should HR continue encouraging Meera towards people leadership, believing that high-potential employees should sometimes be challenged beyond the career choices that feel most comfortable to them?
Or should Meridian accept that she has made a considered choice and invest in a specialist path that offers genuine progression in compensation, influence, recognition and responsibility without requiring her to manage people?
And if neither is sufficient, is there a third path: have one final career conversation to understand what Meera wants to build towards, expose her to forms of leadership that do not require direct reports, and then allow her choice to determine the direction?
What’s really at stake
This is a question about whether an organisation can recognise more than one form of ambition without lowering its expectations of what career growth requires.
The traditional career ladder is familiar. An employee performs well as an individual contributor, takes on a team, becomes a manager and gradually progresses into larger leadership roles. There is a reason organisations follow that model. As employees become more senior, they are expected to create impact beyond their own output. People management is one way of doing that.
But Meera has not said she does not want to grow. She has said she does not want growth to require moving away from the work in which she creates the most value. That distinction matters.
There is also a risk in steering strong specialists towards people management. Technical excellence does not automatically predict managerial effectiveness. An employee can be exceptional at solving problems and indifferent to the very work that management requires: developing others, handling conflict, giving feedback and delivering through a team. Promoting such an employee may solve the organisation’s career-path problem while creating a management problem.
The challenge is whether Meridian values specialist contribution as much as it values people leadership, and whether its career architecture can demonstrate that without making the specialist path feel like a consolation route.
The deeper question is harder to avoid: if an employee wants to grow but not manage people, can the organisation offer a path that is genuinely different without making it genuinely lesser?
We asked three HR leaders how they would approach this dilemma.
What HR leaders said
Siddhartha Ganguly, senior vice president, human resources, Bennett Coleman and Co
“Organisations today are dealing with a multigenerational workforce with increasingly diverse expectations around career growth. This is challenging the traditional assumption that career progression must follow a linear path from individual contributor to team lead, manager and eventually senior leadership. Many organisations still equate ambition with people management. That assumption needs to change.
In Meera’s case, her decision not to pursue a management role should be respected, particularly if the organisation can offer her a meaningful alternative. This is where a dual career architecture becomes important: one path focused on leadership and people management, and another on specialist and expert careers. The specialist track should provide clearly defined destination roles with comparable competencies, rewards and milestones, where contribution is assessed through the complexity of problems solved, the innovation driven and the business outcomes influenced.
HR should also understand what is behind Meera’s decision. If it stems from apprehension, mentoring and coaching can help. But if she genuinely wants to build her career as a specialist, repeatedly pushing her towards management sends the wrong message about what the organisation considers ambition.
Choosing expertise over management should not be viewed as choosing an easier career. Career growth should be about increasing contribution, capability and business impact, not simply the number of people an employee manages.”
Aman Jain, CHRO, e2E Rail
“Growth in an organisation should be a win-win proposition. Both the organisation and the employee should benefit from the opportunities it creates. When growth becomes something the organisation wants and the employee merely tolerates, it is no longer growth. It becomes compliance.
HR and her manager did the right thing by offering Meera the team-lead role. When she declined, it was reasonable to try again, but not by repeating the same offer. A better approach would be to explore alternatives such as a stretch assignment, a mentoring role or project leadership without direct reports. There should, however, be a limit. A high-potential employee can be offered the leadership pathway two or, at most, three times. Beyond that, continued pressure stops being development and becomes an organisational agenda.
The manager’s question about whether Meera lacks ambition points to the larger issue. Ambition is not synonymous with managing people. Meera’s ambition may be to master her craft, and that should be recognised rather than questioned. If employees see that the only route to progression requires moving away from the work they excel at, the message is clear: the only way up is through management.
Many organisations struggle with dual career ladders in practice. While they may exist on paper, specialist tracks can sometimes have lower ceilings, fewer rewards or less visibility than managerial careers. The result can be a double loss: organisations risk losing strong specialists while placing people into management roles they never genuinely wanted.”
Devvesh P Srivastav, global HR director and regional HR head, Centrient Pharmaceuticals
“If I were Meera’s HR partner, I would resist asking, ‘Why don’t you want to become a manager?’ Instead, I would ask: ‘What does a successful career look like for you?’
Meera’s situation is not unusual. HR leaders often identify strong individual contributors as high potential and, by default, see people management as the next logical step. But being a high performer and wanting to manage people are two different things. Meera has demonstrated ambition through her results, expertise and contribution. Her ambition simply has a different shape.
I would respect her decision, but not stop the conversation. Choosing not to manage people should not mean choosing not to grow. A strong specialist career can offer greater expertise, ownership of critical problems, mentoring, thought leadership, innovation, visibility and financial progression.
This is where organisations need to move from the classic career ladder to a career lattice, where growth is not limited to vertical progression. If the best specialists have to become managers to progress, are organisations really offering career choices?
There is also a business lesson here. A great specialist does not automatically become a great manager simply because they are promoted. Organisations can sometimes move people away from the work where they create exceptional value and into roles they never wanted.
My approach would be to create two equally credible career journeys, specialist leadership and people leadership, with comparable opportunities for growth, recognition, visibility and rewards. The important shift is to stop asking, ‘Why don’t you want to become a manager?’ and start asking, ‘Where do you want to create the most impact, and how can we help you get there?’ That, to me, is mature HR: not defining ambition for people, but creating the space for people to define it for themselves.”
If you were the CHRO at Meridian Software
Meera has twice declined people management. Her manager is beginning to question her ambition. She is beginning to question whether Meridian has room for the career she wants.
What would you do?
- Build a specialist path offering comparable progression, compensation, visibility and influence?
- Have one more structured career conversation, explore other forms of leadership and then respect the direction Meera chooses?
- Continue encouraging her towards management, believing that developing high-potential employees sometimes means challenging their assumptions about what they want?
Or is the bigger question this:
If the only meaningful way up is through people management, does the organisation really offer more than one definition of success?
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