Two contributions that should not be confused
An experienced professional may become more valuable because of technical judgement without becoming more interested in managing people. The two contributions can overlap, but one does not establish the other. In our 2023 career discussion, nineteen professionals were considering their next responsibility. The usual advancement conversation tended towards a team to manage. I wanted the company to examine whether that route described the contribution it actually needed from each person, or merely the most familiar way to signal seniority.
Some colleagues genuinely wanted management. They were interested in allocating work, developing people and carrying the responsibilities that come with a team. Others wanted a deeper technical role, with different expectations and a different account of contribution. Creating a principal route was therefore not an argument against management. It was a decision to make another kind of senior work explicit. If the company valued that work, it needed to describe and fund it rather than reward expertise only after the person accepted an unrelated set of duties.
Latha led the professional discussion about the competence and authority required. HR worked on the employment structure around it. That separation mattered. A principal title could not confer technical approval rights by itself, and attendance at a programme could not replace the relevant professional assessment. The role needed a real account of responsibility, not a status label designed to reassure someone who had not become a manager. The company also needed to know who would assess the work and how the role related to other technical and executive owners.
Eight of the nineteen chose principal technical positions. Seven chose the people-management route, and four remained undecided at the review date. I retain all three groups because the decision was about different responsibilities, not a contest to maximise acceptance of a new programme. The technical route was not automatically the more enlightened choice. Nor did the management route mean abandoning expertise. Each person and the enterprise needed to understand what the proposed role required, including the obligations that were less visible than the title or remuneration.
The recurring cost of making the choice real
The eight principal positions added ₹56 lakh annual role expense. That was a total incremental commitment, not a uniform award to each person. Finance asked why the enterprise should fund more senior roles without obtaining additional management capacity. Farhan asked how the business would develop the managers it still needed if experienced colleagues preferred another route. These were legitimate objections. A career structure cannot create an answer to every workforce requirement merely by offering more choices.
We accepted the recurring cost and kept the management-pipeline question open. The enterprise would still need people willing and prepared to lead teams. It could not require every valuable technical professional to fill that need as the price of advancement. That choice imposed work on succession planning and recruitment, and it limited the simplicity of the old progression model. The benefit sought was a more coherent use of expertise, but the approved structure did not itself demonstrate improved retention or technical outcomes. Those would require later evidence.
A substantive technical route also needs a clear relationship with ordinary cooperation. Senior professionals already help colleagues and discuss difficult work. A principal position should not imply that useful judgement can be offered only through a special title. The role concerns a more defined responsibility and the time, assessment and remuneration attached to it. Without that distinction, an enterprise can accidentally formalise every conversation or create a hierarchy in which other experienced colleagues feel that their contribution no longer counts.
Assessment requires equal care. The work may not be best represented by the size of a team or the amount billed directly to a client. That does not mean it should escape evaluation. The relevant owners need an account of what was asked, how the professional contribution was examined and which consequences can reasonably be attributed to it. A whole project's outcome may depend on many people and conditions. The role should not be justified by claiming all of that result, just as it should not be dismissed because its contribution cannot be reduced to one convenient commercial number.
Respecting an undecided career
The four undecided colleagues were not an awkward residue to remove from the announcement. A choice between kinds of responsibility can require time. Someone may need to understand the work better, consider personal preferences or see how the enterprise will implement the role. The company must still make staffing decisions, but it should not interpret hesitation automatically as a lack of ambition. Our account retained the four as undecided rather than assigning them to a route to make the programme appear fully allocated.
There is a further limit: the new route did not promise advancement to every employee who preferred it. A role has to meet an enterprise need and be supported by the appropriate evidence of readiness. A fair career discussion can acknowledge preference and still conclude that an appointment is not yet suitable. The important distinction is between explaining that judgement and allowing a single management ladder to decide in advance that technical ambition has no senior destination. An explicit alternative makes the assessment more honest, not automatically easier.
For a board, the useful questions concern the enterprise's capability and the consequences of the structure. What technical work requires this level of responsibility? How is competence established? What annual commitment is being made? How will management needs be met alongside it? Directors should not select individual technical appointees from a public career narrative or assume that a named route proves professional quality. They should be able to examine whether management has connected the career proposition with the work the business expects to require.
The original decision produced eight principal positions, seven management-route choices and four continuing discussions. It did not end the relationship between technical and people leadership. Some careers may later cross between them, with the relevant preparation and assessment. Others may develop deeply within one kind of work. The employer's responsibility is to make those possibilities intelligible without implying that a person must first become something else to have their existing contribution recognised at a more demanding level.
I would describe the programme as a funded choice of responsibility, not a celebration of titles. The recurring cost, the continued need for managers and the undecided group are all part of its meaning. An organisation that depends on technical judgement should be able to offer a serious account of how that judgement can develop. Sometimes the next step includes a team to manage. Sometimes it does not. The career structure should be capable of explaining both without treating one as the only respectable evidence of progress.