For decades, the professional career ladder followed a familiar path: Employees demonstrated their skills, earned a promotion, and eventually moved into management. But that model is facing a challenge as more workers question whether becoming a people manager is worth the added responsibility.
The trend has been dubbed “unbossing,” a growing reluctance — particularly among younger workers — to step into management roles, often because of concerns about stress, flexibility, and work/life balance. Recent research found that more than half of surveyed job seekers who are or were managers have left or plan to leave their roles because of a lack of fulfillment or advancement. Nearly 75% of workers surveyed from Generation Z said they would rather develop their individual expertise than manage other employees.
Jennifer Currence, SHRM-SCP, senior partner at HR Soul, an HR consulting and services firm based in Tampa, Fla., identified several possible factors behind the trend, including changes in how younger workers interact, the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and employees’ experiences with their own managers.
“This might be the biggest reason: they don’t like their own managers,” she said. “If they don’t have positive role models, how are they incentivized to move into that role? If they are complaining about their manager on the daily, why would they want to sign up to be the person others are complaining about?”
Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School in Boston, listed several additional contributing factors to the unbossing trend, including a lack of commitment to the implied career path. Nearly half of college graduates are judged to be underemployed, he said, and “if people are in roles or industries they hope to escape, their interest in advancement is likely to be low.”
Fuller added that changing attitudes toward work are occurring alongside broader shifts in employment, including the growth of contingent work.
“We continue to grow in gig or contingent work, especially in higher order skills,” he said. “There is a market in providing specific knowledge, or what I refer to as contextual intelligence, while the market for simpler tasks, like web design or basic analytical tasks, is declining materially in the face of generative AI.”
Fuller concluded that workers can augment their income doing tasks they voluntarily undertake. “That may make the higher wages and greater responsibility — with a concomitant reduction in flexibility — less appealing,” he said.
Why Managers May Look Less Attractive
The manager’s job has also become more complicated. Managers are expected to navigate rapid technological change, shifting employee expectations, and evolving business priorities while often overseeing larger teams with fewer layers of support.
Careerminds Founder and President Raymond Lee said that changing workplace demands can make management particularly intimidating to younger workers.
“The speed at which change is occurring is often difficult for managers to navigate,” Lee said. “Years ago, a job was very well defined. Change to the business happened more slowly. It feels like today it is less about roles and more about skills and capabilities.”
Managers now need a broader range of capabilities, including change management, he said.
That creates a development challenge for HR. Organizations cannot simply identify high-performing individual contributors and promote them into management. They need to prepare potential leaders for the fundamentally different skills involved in managing people.
“A strong individual contributor doesn’t always make for a strong manager or leader of people,” Lee said. The skill sets are different, making manager capability an area where organizations need to invest in development.
Currence recommended combining formal education with practical experience.
“Formal training is a great and necessary start, but action learning is an even better approach,” she said. “Action learning provides participants with the formal education alongside a coach and/or activity to put it into action.”
Employers could incorporate progressive management capabilities into career paths, giving employees opportunities to build skills before they formally become supervisors.
Currence provided an example pathway: “An operations associate must complete a communications class to be considered for promotion to a senior associate, who must complete an emotional intelligence and conflict management class to be considered for promotion to a team lead. The lead must complete a decision-making, coaching, and developing others class to be promoted to supervisor, then an accountability, delegation, and change management class to be eligible for promotion to manager.”
Lee emphasized the importance of early preparation. “HR needs to support managers with training, development, and coaching,” he said. “Support early career employees during the onboarding process, to start preparing for management if that’s something they want in their career path.”
The Promotion Needs to Be Worth It
The broader reluctance to pursue management also reflects a changing view of what a promotion should provide. Careerminds research found that nearly 1 in 3 U.S. workers offered a promotion in the previous year turned it down. The top reason was maintaining work/life balance, cited by 23%. Other respondents pointed to inadequate pay and additional stress.
Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Professor Bobbi Thomason said that organizations need to reconsider how they reward management work.
“Sometimes the pay is simply not worth the extra work,” she said. “So if companies want excellent managers, they need to be rewarding that hard, tedious, time-sucking work.”
Compensation is one lever, but it is not the only one. Thomason suggested that organizations can also provide additional perks and development opportunities, while protecting the parts of an employee’s work that are most meaningful to them.
For example, a technical employee could take on a limited management role while retaining some technical responsibilities. “It could be containing the number of people they’re managing such that they still have the bandwidth to continue their technical work,” Thomason said.
Management Isn’t the Only Definition of Career Growth
The reluctance to become a manager does not necessarily mean employees lack ambition. Instead, workers may be placing greater value on autonomy, flexibility, and the opportunity to deepen their expertise.
Thomason pointed to sales professionals who can earn more by remaining high-performing individual contributors, as well as engineers and academics who are passionate about technical work but may see management as pulling them away from the activities they value most.
Employers that equate advancement with managing people can inadvertently force employees to choose between career progression and the work they actually enjoy.
“Organizations really need to think about what their employees love to do and what employees see as the highest and best use of their time,” Thomason said. “People often have a part of their job that they really love. They may feel that taking on a leadership role will not only take time away from that work, but potentially prevent them from doing it altogether.”
Creating parallel career tracks for individual contributors and people leaders can give employees another way to advance without treating management as the default destination.
The future of leadership may depend less on convincing every top performer to become a boss and more on creating workplaces where the right people want to lead and where taking on that responsibility is genuinely supported and rewarded.
Lee said that organizations can identify management potential among individual contributors and provide support to help them make the transition.
“That kind of support would encourage some individuals to step out of their comfort zone,” he said.
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