The fluorescent hum of the conference room was a physical weight. David’s eyes burned, not from fatigue, but from the sheer alien nature of the spreadsheet glowing on the 63-inch monitor. Each cell contained a number that felt both monumentally important and utterly meaningless. He was staring at a projected Q3 budget variance of negative $43,273, and the only thought in his head was about the elegant simplicity of a recursive function he’d been sketching out before this meeting was forced upon him. For 13 years, David wrote code. Not just code, but the kind of clean, efficient, almost poetic architecture that other engineers studied. He solved impossible problems. He was the go-to, the wizard, the one who could untangle any knot. So they gave him a team of 13 people, a budget, and a title: Engineering Manager. And in doing so, they had taken the one thing he was brilliant at and replaced it with a dozen things he was terrible at.

We are obsessed with a deeply flawed idea: that the reward for being good at a job is to stop doing that job. We take our best violinist and make them the conductor. We take our best chef and make them a restaurant administrator. We take our best salesperson and chain them to a desk to approve expense reports. Then we act surprised when the music falters, the food quality drops, and the sales team loses its star player and gains a mediocre supervisor. We’ve created a corporate ladder where the only direction is up, and ‘up’ almost always means away from the craft that earned the climb in the first place. It’s a bait-and-switch operation on a systemic scale, and it’s creating a legion of miserable, ineffective leaders and depleting our pool of expert practitioners.

The Systemic Bait-and-Switch

I’ll admit, I used to champion this very system. I once argued, quite forcefully and successfully, that the senior-most practitioner was the only logical choice to lead a team. Competence, I argued, was a universal solvent. You could pour it on any problem-code, people, budgets-and it would work. I won the argument. The promotion went through. And I watched a brilliant strategist, a woman who could see 23 moves ahead in any market, drown in the daily minutiae of managing vacation schedules and mediating personality conflicts. Her talent wasn’t just wasted; it was suffocated. It was one of the most significant professional blunders of my career, born from the arrogance of believing one kind of intelligence translates to all others.

Think about Hayden Z. Hayden was an archaeological illustrator, and one of the last of a dying breed. Give him a fragment of a 3,000-year-old pot, and he could render a cross-section with such precision and intuitive understanding that you could feel the hands of the person who made it. His work was solitary, deeply focused, and required a monk-like patience. He worked for a large cultural heritage firm that, in its wisdom, decided to “reward” his 23 years of excellence by making him the Head of the Artifact Documentation Unit. Overnight, his world of charcoal sticks and calipers was replaced by performance reviews, inter-departmental budget battles, and endless meetings about migrating their digital archives to a new cloud server. He had to manage a team of 13 illustrators, photographers, and scanners. His personal output went from prolific to zero. The team’s morale plummeted because their new manager, a legend in his own right, had no idea how to advocate for them, shield them from bureaucracy, or develop their careers. He only knew how to draw. The organization lost its best illustrator and gained a shell-shocked, ineffective administrator. Everyone lost.

Organizational Decay & Phantom Leaders

This isn’t just about unhappiness; it’s about organizational decay. The skills that make someone a phenomenal “doer”-hyper-focus, individual contribution, a relentless drive for personal perfection in a craft-are often the very antithesis of what makes a good manager. A manager’s job is not to be the best doer on the team. Their job is to remove obstacles, cultivate talent in others, translate organizational goals into team tasks, and create a psychological safety net so others can do their best work. Their entire focus is outward, not inward. It’s a role of service, of communication, of empathy. It requires a person to derive satisfaction not from their own output, but from the success of their team. That’s a seismic psychological shift, one we give people about 3 minutes of training to accomplish, if any.

So we end up with these phantom leaders. They “manage” by diving in and doing the work themselves, either because they don’t trust their team or because it’s the only place they still feel competent. They micromanage the craft they know and ignore the human elements they don’t. They measure everyone by their own, often impossible, standards as an individual contributor. The result is a bottlenecked team with stagnating skills and a manager who is rapidly burning out. They yearn for the days when they could just put on their headphones and work.

Building a Different Kind of Ladder

We need to build a different kind of ladder. Or, better yet, a climbing wall with multiple routes to the top. A technical track that allows a master craftsman like David or Hayden to gain status, compensation, and influence without ever having to manage a single person. A path where they can become a “principal,” a “fellow,” or a “master artisan” who mentors others, solves the hardest problems, and consults across the organization. This isn’t a consolation prize; it is a vital, parallel track that honors deep expertise. Separating the path of technical mastery from the path of people leadership validates both as legitimate and difficult professions. It tells your people that you value their craft just as much as you value management. This requires a complete rewiring of organizational thinking, often starting from the top. For many businesses, especially those built by a founder who was a master “doer,” making this transition requires guidance. Finding a Business Coach Atlanta or a similar advisory service is often the first step in redesigning career paths that don’t force your best players into the wrong game.

I often wonder about the vast reservoir of human potential we squander with this single-track mindset. How many brilliant inventions have been lost because the inventor was promoted into managing budget meetings? How many teams have fallen apart because their leader was a genius coder but an emotional novice? The cost is staggering, but it’s hidden in plain sight, written off as “the cost of doing business” or “leadership challenges.” It’s not. It’s a design flaw in the very blueprint of our organizations.