The Expertise Penalty and Why Career Progression Shouldn’t Require People Management
- 5 hours ago
- 11 min read
Written by Rosie Hewat, Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People
Rosie Hewat is a Board and Executive Advisor and the Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People, a leadership and organisational advisory platform. She works with founders, boards, and senior leaders navigating complexity, scale, and high-stakes decision-making across global and regulated environments.
There is a strange contradiction at the heart of many organisations. Someone becomes exceptionally good at their job. They develop years of specialist knowledge. They become the person colleagues approach when something difficult needs solving. They understand the nuances, exceptions, and problems that are not written in the manual.
Then, eventually, we tell them that if they want more money, greater status, or another promotion, they need to start managing people.
The excellent engineer becomes an engineering manager. The outstanding salesperson becomes a sales manager. The brilliant technical specialist acquires a team. The experienced practitioner gradually spends less time practising and more time conducting one-to-one meetings, approving leave, completing performance reviews, resolving conflicts, and managing other people’s careers.
We call this progression. But sometimes, what the organisation has actually done is remove an excellent specialist from the work they were exceptional at and create a reluctant manager in their place.
As organisations reconsider how work should be structured for the next decade, I think we also need to reconsider one of our oldest assumptions about careers: Why does progression so often require people management?
Being excellent at your job does not mean you will be excellent at managing people
This is not simply anecdotal.
Research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue examined promotion decisions across 214 firms and found evidence consistent with what is commonly called the Peter Principle: organisations frequently prioritised performance in an employee’s existing role when making promotion decisions, despite other characteristics being better predictors of managerial performance. The finding matters because the capabilities are different.
Being an exceptional salesperson requires one set of capabilities. Managing ten salespeople requires another. Writing exceptional software is different from managing software engineers. Designing brilliant products is different from managing the performance, development, and careers of a product team. We should therefore stop treating people management as the inevitable next level of proficiency in another profession. People management is a different profession!
That distinction matters. Someone can manage a product, programme, technical discipline, system, or complex body of work without becoming responsible for another person’s performance, development, and career. We have allowed the word manager to become unnecessarily synonymous with people manager, when they are not the same thing.
I have seen this repeatedly during my own career. I have worked with people who were promoted into managerial positions despite having very little desire to manage people. They were technically excellent. They were willing to help colleagues. They would happily mentor someone more junior, share knowledge, or show another person how something should be done.
But they did not want responsibility for another person’s career. Those are not the same thing. When the organisation subsequently complained that the individual was not a particularly good manager, the conversation often became, “Perhaps they need management training.” Sometimes they did. But training cannot manufacture desire.
You can teach someone how to conduct a performance conversation. You can explain employment processes, delegation, coaching techniques, and feedback models. What training cannot necessarily do is make someone want the responsibility that comes with managing other human beings. Willingness matters.
People management asks somebody to take responsibility not only for their own performance, but for the working experience, development, and, at times, difficult moments in somebody else’s career. That responsibility should never be assigned simply because nobody else was available to take it.
Mentorship is not management
I think this distinction is frequently overlooked. A senior specialist can be an extraordinary mentor without becoming somebody’s line manager.
They can teach. They can challenge. They can review work. They can share twenty years of hard-earned knowledge. They can help a younger colleague understand why the textbook answer will not work in a particular situation. They can set technical standards and provide intellectual leadership.
None of this requires them to approve someone’s annual leave, manage an absence, conduct a disciplinary conversation, or decide whether that individual deserves a promotion. Yet our career structures frequently bundle all of those responsibilities together. People management carries a significant emotional load that job descriptions rarely acknowledge.
People do not stop being human when they arrive at work. Sometimes they tell their manager about bereavement, financial problems, relationship breakdowns, health concerns, or difficulties at home.
A good manager has to know how to listen without becoming a therapist, how to support without overstepping, when to involve HR, and when an employee simply needs somebody to hear them.
Then there are the difficult conversations. Underperformance does not become emotionally effortless because somebody attended management training. Neither does telling someone they are not receiving the promotion they wanted, addressing problematic behaviour, managing conflict between colleagues, or explaining decisions you know somebody will find upsetting.
Managers can finish those conversations emotionally exhausted and then have to walk into their next meeting as though nothing happened. That is work. Organisations need to recognise it as such.
The hidden problem of the accidental manager
The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) describes people promoted into management without formal management or leadership training as “accidental managers.”
Its research reports that 82% of managers entering management positions have received no formal management and leadership training. CMI also found that employees who rated their manager as ineffective were considerably more likely to say they intended to leave their organisation. Training therefore matters enormously. But I would go one step further.
Before asking whether someone has been trained to manage, organisations should ask whether they actually want to manage.
There are arguably two different problems: the untrained manager and the unwilling manager. Training can help solve the first. It cannot automatically solve the second.
That distinction is something we encounter in our own management development work at Rosie’s People. Before delivering management training, we assess the people who are actually being asked to manage. Sometimes that process reveals a training need. But sometimes it reveals something more fundamental: the person never particularly wanted to become a people manager in the first place.
They may have accepted the role because it was presented as the next stage of progression, because the salary increase depended on taking responsibility for a team, or simply because somebody needed to manage the function and they were the obvious person available. In those circumstances, immediately prescribing management training risks treating the symptom rather than examining the appointment itself. The consequences matter far beyond the individual manager.
Gallup has estimated that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That should make management selection a strategic decision rather than the automatic reward for technical performance.
That means assessment should come before appointment, and appointment should come before training. Organisations should assess not only whether someone could manage people, but whether they understand what people management involves and genuinely want the responsibility. Capability can be developed. Motivation should not simply be assumed.
We have confused progression with hierarchy
In my previous article on the Capability Centred Organisation, I argued that organisations need to become less obsessed with jobs and headcount and more deliberate about the capabilities they need to build, retain, and deploy. The Expertise Penalty is one of the clearest examples of why that shift matters.
If an organisation genuinely values capability, it makes little sense to tell someone, "You are exceptionally valuable because of the expertise you have accumulated. Therefore, the only way we will allow you to progress is by spending considerably less time using it."
Yet that is essentially how many career structures operate. The higher someone climbs, the more people they acquire. Headcount becomes a proxy for seniority. The person managing 50 people appears more senior than the person whose expertise influences the work of 500.
But organisational value does not work that neatly. Some people lead through people. Others lead through expertise. Some lead through intellectual authority, standards, systems, innovation, or professional judgment.
Leadership and people management overlap, but they are not synonymous.
The specialist track cannot be a consolation prize
Dual career paths are not new. Technology, engineering, science, and research organisations have experimented with specialist and managerial pathways for decades. But creating a few new titles does not solve the underlying problem.
A specialist pathway only becomes a genuine alternative when progression brings meaningful increases in pay, status, influence, and decision-making authority. Otherwise, employees quickly learn which hierarchy actually matters.
If the managerial track leads to executive compensation, strategic meetings, and organisational influence while the specialist track leads to increasingly impressive job titles but limited authority, there are not really two tracks.
There is one career ladder and one waiting room. We therefore need to rethink what seniority means.
A Principal Engineer, Senior Scientist, Chief Architect, or equivalent domain expert should be capable of reaching levels of compensation and organisational influence comparable with a senior manager where the value they create justifies it.
That does not mean the roles are identical. It means one form of contribution should not automatically be considered more valuable simply because it contains direct reports.
There are contemporary examples of this becoming more concrete. Princeton University recently documented a research software engineering career framework spanning Associate through Principal levels, alongside team lead and management routes, recognising that technical mastery, leadership, and people management do not have to be the same career.
The terminology will vary between organisations. The principle should not.
People management is also more work
There is another part of this conversation organisations sometimes avoid. If you add responsibility for people to somebody’s existing role, you have added another job.
Managing even a small team creates work: one-to-one meetings, performance and development conversations, absence, recruitment, conflict, salary and promotion decisions, administration, and escalation. Alongside those visible responsibilities sits the less visible emotional labour that accompanies responsibility for other people.
Technology can remove some administrative burden, but it cannot remove accountability. Yet organisations sometimes add two, three, or five direct reports to somebody’s role and treat the change almost as though they have simply amended their job title.
Perhaps there is a small salary adjustment. Perhaps there isn’t. But responsibility has fundamentally changed.
Reward should reflect that change. People management should not be treated as a minor addition to an existing role simply because the individual continues to retain their technical responsibilities. If an organisation wants someone to carry accountability for other people’s performance, development, and working experience, that additional responsibility should be recognised in workload, expectations, and reward.
This is particularly important where someone is expected to remain a full-time practitioner while simultaneously becoming a people manager. We should stop pretending those responsibilities occupy no time. If someone is expected to manage people properly, organisations need to create capacity for them to do it properly.
Expertise should be allowed to become leadership
This does not mean senior specialists should work in isolation. Quite the opposite. I would expect senior specialists to have increasing responsibility for the capability around them. But that responsibility can take different forms.
They might mentor early career employees. They might establish professional standards. They might own a technical architecture. They might lead complex projects. They might review high-risk decisions. They might teach. They might represent the organisation externally. They might develop intellectual property or institutional knowledge. They might have authority over a particular professional domain without having administrative responsibility for every person working within it.
This also connects directly to another argument I made in What Happens When AI Removes the Work That Teaches Us How to Work?
In that article, I explored the risk of removing the developmental experiences through which junior employees acquire judgment. If we are serious about addressing that Apprenticing Gap, senior experts become even more important.
But we don’t necessarily need to turn every expert into a line manager to access their knowledge. In fact, forcing them to spend large portions of their time on administration and performance management may reduce the time available for exactly the mentoring and knowledge transfer organisations increasingly need.
The answer is not less responsibility for senior specialists. It is different responsibility.
Alternative routes into work require alternative routes through work
Governments, education systems, and employers are increasingly debating alternative routes into employment: apprenticeships, technical education, vocational pathways, and skills-based hiring. But it is not enough to create alternative routes into work. We also need credible alternative routes through work.
Imagine encouraging a young person to become an exceptional engineer, scientist, cybersecurity specialist, designer, or technician. They spend 15 years mastering that discipline. Then, eventually, the organisation tells them, “You’ve become so good at this that we’d now like you to stop doing most of it and manage the people who do.”
There is something structurally odd about that. Career progression should allow mastery to compound rather than eventually penalising it.
Select people managers before you train them
Management development should therefore begin earlier than the training room. In our work at Rosie’s People, we encourage organisations to look at management selection as part of organisational design rather than simply learning and development.
Before appointing someone to people management, I would want to understand three things: Do they want to manage people? Do they demonstrate the behaviours and judgement required to do it well? And does the organisation have the capacity to support and develop them once they take responsibility for others?
That assessment may identify someone who is enthusiastic but inexperienced, an excellent candidate for management development. It may identify someone who is unsure and needs greater exposure before deciding. Sometimes it will identify an exceptional specialist who simply does not want to manage people. That should not be interpreted as a lack of ambition.
The organisational answer should not always be to persuade the third person into management. Sometimes the better answer is to build them a credible route to progress without it.
Six questions organisations should ask
For CEOs, CHROs, COOs, and people leaders reviewing career architecture, I would start with six questions:
Can our best specialists reach senior levels of compensation without becoming people managers?
Do we assess whether someone genuinely wants to manage people before offering them a people management role?
Do we assess managerial aptitude separately from technical performance?
Can someone exercise meaningful organisational leadership without acquiring direct reports?
Are our specialist career paths equal in influence as well as title?
Are managers given the time, development, support, and reward required to manage people properly, or are we simply adding people management to an already full-time job?
The answers will reveal whether an organisation genuinely values expertise or merely values it until the next management vacancy appears.
Conclusion: Progression should increase contribution, not redirect it
None of this is an argument against people management. Quite the opposite, it is an argument for taking people management more seriously.
Good managers are extraordinarily valuable and can make a huge difference within an organisation. They create clarity. They develop people. They resolve ambiguity. They protect teams during difficult periods. They make hard decisions. They create environments in which other people can perform.
That work deserves people who genuinely want to do it and organisations willing to invest in preparing and supporting them to do it well.
At the same time, great specialists deserve careers that do not eventually punish them for wanting to remain specialists. Perhaps the future of career progression is therefore not a ladder at all. It is a choice between different forms of increasing contribution. One person may choose to lead people. Another may lead a discipline. Another may lead products, systems, research, or professional standards. All can be leadership.
Because people management should not be the reward for being excellent at another profession. It should be treated as a profession in its own right.
If capability really is becoming the organising principle of the modern enterprise, our career structures need to start reflecting it.
Progression should increase a person’s contribution, not require them to abandon the capability that made them valuable in the first place in order to be rewarded, recognised, or compensated fairly.
Read more from Rosie Hewat
Rosie Hewat, Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People
Rosie Hewat is a Board and Executive Advisor and Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People, a leadership and organisational advisory platform. A former Group Chief People Officer and Non-Executive Director, she has supported leadership teams and boards operating in high-growth and regulated environments. Rosie is also a trustee and an Executive Contributor to Brainz Magazine, where she writes on leadership, governance, power, and organisational risk.
Sources and further reading:
National Bureau of Economic Research: Promotions and the Peter Principle – Benson, Li and Shue’s empirical study of promotion and subsequent managerial performance.
Chartered Management Institute (CMI): Better Management Report – Research on accidental managers, management training and employee outcomes.
Chartered Management Institute (CMI): Don't leave young workers' futures to accidental managers – CMI’s January 2026 discussion of management capability and development.
Gallup: Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement – Research on the relationship between management and employee engagement.
Princeton research: Designing and Implementing a Comprehensive Research Software Engineer Career Ladder – 2026 case study describing parallel technical, team-lead, and managerial progression pathways.
