“Taking on that bigger role can absolutely be worth the risk. Just be honest with yourself about why this is your goal. Is the work itself pulling you forward, or is your ego simply chasing a mirage?”
There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from solving a difficult problem. Maybe it’s a complex query that finally returns the right rows or a test suite that catches a mismatch before it reaches production. Or perhaps it is the wrangling of undocumented legacy code to slowly evolve it into business rules that someone can actually understand. There is no award ceremony for this type of work, and I wouldn’t even expect to get a brief callout in the next all-hands meeting either. But still, you know it worked, and that counts for something, right? For many people, that is all that is needed and desired.
With that said, at some point, most strong individual contributors are offered a different kind of role and that is leading the people who do the work. This is a different situation with different parameters. For some, it might be the next logical stage in their career. For others, navigating the obvious (and subtle) shifts in day-to-day obligations is a challenge. The offer is typically packaged as a promotion, and that might seem like the obvious best outcome, as well. However, it is not always the right one.
I have moved back and forth throughout my career, from analyst and product manager to directing several product teams at once. It can be a very fluid process. I have come to see the choice as a decision for your life at this point in time rather than a default you accept in order to progress your career.
So do you take the promotion or stay on the individual contributor track? It’s not always a simple answer. In my experience, the better question to ask yourself is whether the pending move grows from your roots or from your ego.
The Individual Contributor: The work is its own reward
Technical work has a feedback loop that leadership rarely matches. You form a theory, test it, and get an answer, often in the same afternoon. When I was reverse engineering old stored procedures to document the business rules buried inside them, or building matching logic to reconcile records from two different hosts, the progress was visible (to me) every day. Some of the work that I am proudest of had no formal recognition. And being content with that matters because recognition is unreliable. Sometimes the person who fixed the problem gets the credit, and sometimes the person who announced the fix does. Sometimes no one gets credit.
If you find the work itself rewarding, you depend less on who happens to notice. That personal quality is a real occupational strength, and it is worth understanding that about yourself before you trade it for something else.
Why do great individual contributors get promoted out of what they do best?
There is a well-known pattern in organizations, usually called the Peter Principle. Individuals are promoted based on how well they perform in their current role, as opposed to whether they will be good at the next one. The best engineer becomes the engineering manager. The best analyst becomes the team lead. Sometimes it works beautifully. But sometimes an excellent individual contributor becomes an average manager, and the organization loses twice. We will dig into this concept later in the post.
To be clear, none of this is a criticism of the people involved. The skills that make someone great at hands-on work – such as depth, focus, and command of the details – are not always the skills a manager uses most. A manager’s output is other people’s work, and the job is increasingly about measuring that impact. The day is filled with more listening, unblocking, negotiating, and explaining. Some people find that energizing. Others may find it completely draining and unsustainable.
Think about the runway, not just the raise
I find it useful to think about this decision the way a finance person would compare two investments. A bigger number is not automatically the better choice. What matters is the total value over time, and how likely you are to collect it.
A long runway as a great individual contributor can be worth more than a larger payoff with a shorter runway as a struggling leader. Steady, sustainable progress can beat a fast start that burns out. The individual contributor path compounds as skills deepen and reputations grow. Delivering good work also tends to lead to bigger and more complex assignments that further your value to a specific institution or enterprise.
On the other hand, a leadership role that does not fit is hard to unwind, for you and for the organization. Your technical skills start to erode the day you stop using them, and stepping back into hands-on work later means retraining on tools and systems that kept moving without you. The organization pays for that transition too. It has to backfill the role you left, absorb the cost of a struggling team while the problem gets diagnosed, and then procure funding for a second change to fix the first one.
I have noticed the same pattern with college football coaches. A coach with a secure, long-term contract at a solid program gets an offer from a bigger school for a better annual salary…along with more prestige, a larger recruiting footprint, and better facilities. Many of them take it. Some of those advantages are real but others turn out to be a complete mirage. The expectations are higher, the patience is shorter, and the hard work of building a team is compounded. Moreover, as a coach, you control the playbook and scheme, but you don’t run the plays and play the game (we will touch more on this in Part 2). A bigger job like that can be more rocket than runway. In other words, a lot of power and very little fuel.
You cannot plan around every budget cut, reorganization, or layoff, and it is a mistake to make career decisions as if you can. So what can you do? You can build roots that hold up well no matter which way the budget swings.
Whatever your decision, don’t let your ego plant your roots
Ego fuels many decisions to obtain higher pay and more prestige. The hidden charges are added responsibility, more pressure, and potentially, a much shorter runway. Managers can run out of runway by leading ineffective teams or simply by being on the wrong end of a budget decision. When that happens, the cost lands on both sides of the table.
For the individual, the cost is stigma. Stepping back from a leadership role rarely reads as neutral, even when it is the right call, and the label tends to follow the leader rather than the team. Research on what happens to employees after their company fails points the same way. Botelho and Marx found that leaders of failed firms saw weaker wage growth afterward, while the non-executive employees around them generally carried their skills to new employers without a lasting penalty. The people closest to the work keep their value. The people who held the title often get to wear that outcome daily.
For the organization, the cost is entirely sunk. By the time a leadership move is clearly not working, the company has already spent money, time, and goodwill on it, and that history makes the next decision harder instead of easier. Werner Meyer, in his conference paper “The Psychology of Project Termination,” describes this as escalation of commitment, or the tendency to keep investing in a course of action after the evidence says it will not pay off. This is driven largely by sunk costs and the need to justify earlier decisions. In my experience, that pull is strongest when a leader’s own reputation is tied to the outcome, which is exactly where some leaders, even strong ones, face stigma and career crises.
Taking on that bigger role can absolutely be worth the risk. Just be honest with yourself about why this is your goal. Is the work itself pulling you forward, or is your ego simply chasing a mirage?
Instead, plant your roots and let them guide you
Now, back to college football. Those coaches who build lasting programs are usually the ones who dig in. They stay where their strengths fit, grow with the program, and earn a long runway one season at a time. Careers work the same way. Whatever your title, the people with the right blend of skills, relationships, and institutional knowledge are the hardest to replace, and that kind of stability has value that never shows up in a salary. Maybe you decide to dig in as an analyst and move up the ranks into a principal role. Or maybe that means you set your sights on a seat at the management table and use your skills to influence and drive important decisions for the enterprise. Regardless, you need to plant these roots somewhere. You need to have a plan, and you need to water that plan and give it plenty of sunlight.
Roots are what you carry from one role to the next. Roots also branch out and that “anatomy” is important. If you move into leadership, your technical depth comes with you to your new role and shows up at times. Perhaps you jump in on a hard problem or you work through a difficult funding gate. Think of it like forking a codebase. The new branch picks up skills the original never needed, but it still pulls from the original code when the situation calls for it. If you stay hands-on, those same roots let you take on bigger and more complex work. Either way, the runway gets longer when you grow from where your roots are strongest, and shorter when you leap toward whatever looks most impressive.
Again, let’s frame this point around what you can control…and that is what you know, who you know, and how well you leverage both. That is where the longest runway exists…from where your roots are planted the deepest.
So, leadership offers all these risks and only a higher salary, right?
None of this means you should turn down the promotion. What it means is that you should price your runway out realistically, and be clear with yourself about how much of the appeal is the work and how much is the title. The key is to make sure the decision you make for your own career is based on real professional roots and not on hubris or irrational persistence.
Questions worth asking before you decide
Management jobs, much like entry-level and mid-career roles, are learning experiences. Weak managers can adapt and become great leaders. Non-technical managers can still effectively lead technical project teams. Therefore, don’t base your decision on what type of leader you can be today, but instead on who you can grow into tomorrow.
Most importantly, I would first discuss your future growth opportunities with your manager, department lead, or an HR staff member. Many organizations offer lead and principal (or similar) roles for individual contributors that allow staff to serve in senior roles without leading teams and projects directly. Your manager may also have a desired path or recommendations based upon current insights from working with you. Ideally, you will want to introduce that you have a preference (leadership vs. individual contributor) in advance of a promotion and also align on any current gaps in skills needed in order to obtain that next role. Even if you are unable to have that discussion, it is important to know what to expect before you make the move.
If you are weighing the move, these are the questions I would want to answer first:
- Have you ever thought about how you might improve processes and do you hope for an opportunity to prove that you are right? Conversely, are you willing to accept the risk of being wrong?
- Do other people’s wins energize you as much as your own?
- Can you coach instead of correct? Can you let someone solve a problem differently than you would and let them learn from their mistakes without taking the work back?
- Are you comfortable with a calendar full of conversations instead of a queue full of tasks?
- What would you miss most about the hands-on work, and is there a way to keep some of it?
- Are you prepared for some of your technical skills to fade? Leading usually means less time to work hands-on with the newest tools.
- Are you drawn to the work of leading, or to the title, the pay, and what it signals?
- Do you know what you stand for, and where your limits are, when a decision you are asked to carry out conflicts with them?
There is no wrong set of answers. The only real mistake is not asking the questions. And this is the part where you make a decision. Or you don’t and you wait – perhaps right now is not the right time. And recall that I said this is a fluid process, having myself bounced between roles as an individual contributor and as a team leader. The answers to these questions help you form your own opinion. Pay attention to which answers come from your roots and which come from your ego. The roots are what build the longest runway.
Once you have formed that opinion, the next question is what actually changes if you make the move. That is where the second part of this series picks up. Read Part 2: What Changes When You Lead.
Working through something similar? I’m always happy to compare notes. Send me a message or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources
- Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle, William Morrow, 1969.
- Tristan L. Botelho and Matt Marx, Beyond Blame: Evaluative Stigma, Attribution, and Employee Careers after Employer Failure, Administrative Science Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2026).
- W. G. Meyer, The psychology of project termination, PMI Global Congress 2013, North America, Project Management Institute.