Not Everyone Should Manage: How to Build a Career Path for Your Experts

Picture it: your best copywriter, your best engineer, your best strategist just got "promoted." The same person who could take a messy client problem and turn it around is now doing that AND sitting in one-on-ones, wrangling PTO calendars, and feeling buried by a list of to-dos that doesn’t seem to end. They are unhappy and their work is suffering, meaning you now have a mediocre leader of people and a struggling doer all wrapped into one. 

How did this happen? Well, at most professional services firms the path to more money, a better title, and a leadership seat only runs through managing other humans. If you want to grow, you have to manage. It’s the only way up. 

There is another way, and that is to create two tracks for career mobility for your team. Having options allows you to keep both really great doers - subject matter experts - and to also find and elevate good people managers. They are both important. They are both valuable. And you need both to grow your business smartly. 

The Hidden Cost of a One-Path Career Ladder

When people management is the only route to more pay, title, and status, you back yourself into a corner. You're forced to promote based on technical skill - who designs the best, builds the best, or is a client favorite - instead of any criteria that showcases that a person can actually lead other people.

Being good at a craft doesn’t mean you will be good at either teaching others to do it or leading them at being better at it. A few people can make the switch to people management. A few more are okay enough at it to get by. And a few are painfully bad at it. It’s a crapshoot and that is not generally how you want to pick people leadership. 

And truly, you get hit twice when you have a formerly good doer become an okay or bad manager. You dilute their deep expertise because as they struggle to manage their team they no longer have the time to be as good at the craft. And the team can feel that the person isn’t equipped or really interested in leading them, and they struggle as a result. 

The Non-Negotiable Rule: The Tracks Must Be Equal

The concept that having a dual track with equal titles, pay, and respect can feel foreign to leaders. They inherently value people management more, and can’t see a world where someone would get paid for thought leadership at the same level as leading a team of five. But let’s think through this for a second. 

A great SME can provide a lot of things - expertise on an industry or client that they specialize in. Thought leadership on a service your provide and how to tailor that to a high-end project. New ideas on how to develop what you are doing to move upmarket. Create a dedicated resource to strategy on your team. 

These are all things, at least in my experience, clients CRAVE. They love dedicated thinking and ideas. They want strategy all the time. They want someone on top of their industry and competitors to keep them out front. That seems worth the money. 

And that doesn’t factor in how SMEs can help your business itself. Doing experiments and tests for new offerings. Building out processes and ways of work that make you more efficient and effective. Being the best “insert technical ability” here around and everyone knows it - you, your clients, and your competitors. 

Again, that seems pretty valuable. Just as valuable (not more, or less) then being able to guide and grow others, manage employee situations to a positive result, build teams with purpose, and find the right people to meet your growing needs. 

So this part is not optional. Your IC track vs. people manager track must be genuinely equal:

- Same pay ceilings. A Principal or Fellow can earn what a Director or VP earns.

- Same status titles. Not "Senior Specialist" versus "VP." Titles that carry equal weight in a room.

- Same seat. Your senior ICs are in leadership conversations, shaping direction - not summoned only when someone needs a technical answer.

This matters because "dual" ladders drift unequal on their own if you set parity with purpose. A dual career ladder should describe a parallel path letting ICs advance with compensation, recognition, and influence equivalent to the people management track. A gap will creep in unless you design against it.

If the subject matter expert path tops out lower than management, your ambitious people will feel forced into management to grow. And we’ve already talked about how that goes. 

How to Screen for People Management Ability Before You Promote

So how do you know on which track someone belongs? Well, it starts with building out th actual expectations and criteria for each type of role so you can screen, hire, and onboard it successfully. And that criteria can’t only be how long someone has worked there or how many client praise emails they’ve gotten. 

It actually starts in a simple place: interest. Has a person ever shown any interest in managing others? Have they openly asked, hinted at it, or asked questions surrounding management. That’s a good start (though it doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be good at it). 

Next, screen that interest. Is someone asking because they think that is the only way they can grow or is it something they genuinely want to explore. The answer makes a difference. 

Finally, if the person is interested, and seemingly for the right reasons, give them a low-risk, high reward test at managing. That could look like:

1. Lead a task force on a real internal problem.

2. Chair a committee - culture, process, tooling, etc.

3. Mentor an intern or junior hire for a quarter.

These tests can reveal a lot in a relatively safe environment. Some people light up when they get to develop someone else. Others realize, gratefully, that they'd rather be doing the work. Both are useful answers and you got to them with very little (probably) breaking in the process of discovery. 

But none of this works until you've done the unglamorous first step: define, in writing, what a good people manager looks like at your firm. The specific behaviors and competencies laid out in a structured way to evaluate leadership potential before the promotion. This will give you an actual something to measure your potential managers against.

What Leadership Looks Like on the IC Track

As for the IC track, it still has to involve leadership. They, and you, don’t get to opt out of that because someone isn’t managing people. Leadership and management are both needed. ICs just show their leadership in a different way. 

In fact, many of your SMEs lead more than you think. A senior expert can own a project or a rollout end to end. An SME can drive your firm's thought leadership, shape a whole new service line, or set the technical standard everyone else follows. That's all leadership. And it can grow in scope, visibility, and influence without a single performance review to run.

At firms with a genuine dual career ladder, senior IC roles can be designed to match director-level managers in pay, scope, and influence. Leadership and management are separate axes. Your most ambitious expert can keep climbing the influence axis for years without ever taking a direct report and be happy while doing it. 

Build a Path Back: Protecting Your SMEs From a Bad Fit

Even with all that, you'll sometimes get it wrong. Someone takes the manager role, gives it an honest run, and discovers it's not for them.

This is the moment that defines whether your dual track is real. Build a graceful, stigma-free way for that person to step back into a strong IC role. It’s a correction, not a failure. You keep the expertise you spent years building, and you fix the team that needed a better fit.

The alternative is what actually costs you: the mismatched manager, embarrassed and stuck, eventually quits and walks the deep expertise out the door with them. Losing a great SME to a bad promotion is one of the most expensive ways to fill a management seat.

How to Start Building Your Dual-Track Ladder

Building a dual career track might seem like a lot, but there are a few things you can start the process with that won’t take months to develop. 

1. Audit your current ladder. Is there any route to senior pay and title that doesn't run through managing people? If the honest answer is no, you now know where to start your mapping.

2. Draft your "what makes a good manager here" criteria Before you promote anyone else, write. it. down.

3. Pilot low-risk leadership assignments with two or three high performers this quarter. Watch who leans in and who leans out. Let that tell you who belongs on which track.

The firms that get this right stop treating expertise as a stepping stone to something "better” but outside the realm of what the person has been doing. They build two roads up the mountain and make both worth climbing. They keep their best doers doing, put their real leaders in charge of people, and stop paying the quiet tax of a great expert turned mediocre boss.

Ready to redesign your firm's career ladder before you lose another great expert to a bad management fit? Talk to prism+spire about building a dual-track growth model tailored to your business 0 we'll help you map the roles, set real pay parity, and screen for fit before you promote.