Workers want to climb the ladder but many don’t want to be the boss

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Congrats! You’re getting a promotion, but it involves being someone’s boss.

New research from job-search platform JobAssist suggests plenty of workers aren’t interested in that trade-off.

In a survey of 4,400 professionals in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, 34 per cent said they would turn down a promotion if it required managing other employees. Additionally, 39 per cent said they want higher pay, greater seniority or more influence without managing a team.

“I was struck by how many people felt that way, although I can understand the hesitation,” says Pijus Kasteckas, managing director at JobAssist. “A promotion can completely change what someone’s working day looks like. A skilled specialist might go from solving problems they enjoy to spending their time on performance reviews, staffing decisions and team issues.”

Among those who preferred individual-contributor roles, 44 per cent cited responsibility for other employees’ performance as a major downside to taking on a management role, while 38 per cent pointed to difficult conversations or workplace conflict.

All of these preferences, however, can be difficult for workers to admit. Among respondents who wanted to advance without managing people, 47 per cent had avoided expressing that preference because they worried it would make them appear less ambitious.

“When management is the most visible form of seniority, employees may worry that choosing a different path will affect how their ambition is perceived,” says Mr. Kasteckas.

However, traditional pay structures can push workers toward management anyway. Nearly a third of respondents said they would accept a management promotion if it offered the clearest path to substantially higher pay, even if they preferred specialist work.

Mr. Kasteckas says this type of decision-making can backfire on companies and their people. “There’s a risk of losing an excellent specialist without necessarily gaining an effective manager,” he says.

For employers, the findings raise questions about how they reward expertise. More than half of respondents said companies should offer senior individual-contributor positions with pay and status comparable to management roles.

Mr. Kasteckas says that means creating clear promotion criteria, comparable salary ranges and meaningful opportunities for experienced specialists to influence business decisions.

“Creating an impressive-sounding expert title is relatively easy; giving that person genuine influence and earning potential can require a much bigger change,” he says.

For employees who want to advance without managing, Mr. Kasteckas suggests focusing conversations with their employers on the contributions they want to make, the problems they could solve and the results they could deliver.

Before starting with a new company, he says it’s important to ask whether a senior specialist career path exists at their organization.

“It’s better to understand your options early than spend years assuming those opportunities will eventually appear,” he says.

Fast fact

Preemptive pivot

46 per cent

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Matthew Bidwell, an author and professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, explores in this Wall Street Journal article what he calls the “insider advantage,” explaining why staying with one organization can lead to better opportunities for promotion, higher pay, stronger performance and even greater job satisfaction.

Rate repercussions

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Recently, the Bank of Canada raised its benchmark interest rate, marking its first rate increase in more than three years. This Global News article looks at how it may directly and indirectly affect Canadians.

IPO Uh-Oh

Anthropic’s IPO filing includes more than 90 pages of risk disclosures, warning that its own AI technology could pose catastrophic or even existential threats to humanity. Among the concerns are increasingly autonomous AI models that can evade human oversight, manipulate people and exhibit behaviour resembling blackmail.