I am currently staring at a hex key and a pile of particle board that supposedly forms a bookshelf, though I am 26 percent sure that half the internal supports are missing from the box. It is a specific kind of frustration, the realization that the tool you were given does not match the job you were told to do. I have spent 46 minutes trying to force a plastic peg into a hole that is clearly bored at the wrong depth. It is a mess. But as I sit here on the floor, surrounded by Swedish engineering failures, I realize this is the exact same feeling I had when my best friend, a brilliant designer, was promoted to Creative Director. She was the best at what she did-an artisan of the pixel-and now she spends 106 minutes a day arguing about seating charts and vacation requests. We have broken her, just as surely as I am about to break this laminate shelf.

The Trophy of Inutility

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It is as if we saw a world-class violinist and said, ‘You play so well, we have decided to make you the person who schedules the janitors for the concert hall.’

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We are obsessed with the idea that the only way to go is up. In our corporate structures, ‘up’ is a ladder that eventually stops being a ladder and becomes a tightrope. We take people who are exceptionally good at a specific craft-let’s say, building the most elegant database architecture the world has ever seen-and we reward them by telling them they can no longer do that. Instead, they must now manage the people who do that. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of human utility. We are treating management as a trophy rather than a trade.

Two Different Universes

This is the Peter Principle in its most destructive form. It assumes that if you are good at ‘X’, you will be good at ‘Managing people who do X.’ But these are two entirely different universes. Doing the work is about technical precision, individual focus, and often, a healthy dose of introverted flow. Managing the work is about emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and the ability to tolerate 16 interruptions every hour. When we promote our star individual contributors, we aren’t just gaining a bad manager; we are losing our best producer. It is a double-loss that most organizations simply ignore because they don’t have another way to give someone a raise.

I watched this happen at a tech firm where the lead engineer, a guy who could find a bug in 6 seconds just by looking at the screen, was made a VP. Within 96 days, the entire engineering department was in revolt. He was ‘managing’ by opening their pull requests and rewriting their code at 2:06 in the morning. He wasn’t being a jerk; he was just doing the only thing he knew how to do to feel competent. He hated the meetings, he hated the ‘one-on-ones,’ and he hated the budgetary constraints. So he retreated into the code, which made everyone under him feel like a child. He was a master carpenter trying to manage a team by taking the hammers out of their hands because they weren’t swinging them at the exact 16-degree angle he preferred.

The Perverse Incentive of Salary

There is a deep-seated fear in most professionals that if they don’t move into management, they are stagnating. We have built a world where the only way to earn $126,000 instead of $86,000 is to start supervising people. This creates a perverse incentive. People who have no business being in charge of others’ careers will clamor for the role simply to pay their mortgage. We are effectively bribing our experts to stop being experts. If we want to fix this, we have to create parallel tracks. We need ‘Distinguished Contributors’ who are paid as much as VPs but never have to sign a timecard or mediate a dispute between two people who both want the same desk near the window.

In high-stakes environments, the cost of this mismatch is even higher. Think about the hospitality industry or specialized services. You want the person who is naturally gifted at creating a seamless experience to be the one actually delivering that experience, not stuck in a back office filing reports on why the towels aren’t fluffy enough. This is something that firms like Dushi rentals curacao understand implicitly; the magic of a stay is often in the details that only a dedicated expert can manage, and when you remove those experts from the front line to handle administrative bureaucracy, the soul of the service vanishes. You cannot automate or manage ‘vibe’ if the people who create it are busy looking at 76 different KPIs in a boardroom.

Personal Confession: The Wobble

I’ve made this mistake myself. Once, I tried to manage a small team of researchers. I thought because I knew the subject matter better than anyone else, I would be a natural leader. I was wrong. I was terrible. I obsessed over 6-point font choices in their reports instead of helping them develop their own voices. I viewed their mistakes as a personal affront to the data. I lasted 86 days before I stepped down. It was embarrassing, but it was the most honest thing I’ve ever done in my career. I realized that my ‘authority’ was actually an obstacle to their growth. I was the missing screw in the bookshelf, the one that makes the whole thing wobble when you put a heavy book on the top shelf.

Antonio B.-L. eventually quit his director job. He didn’t go to another high-level position. He went back to the field. He took a 26 percent pay cut to become a caseworker again. When I asked him why, he said, ‘I realized I was spending 1006 hours a year talking about people I didn’t know, and zero hours talking to the people who actually needed me.’ He looked younger than he had in years. He had found the right hole for his peg. We need more of that. We need to stop seeing the move from ‘doing’ to ‘managing’ as a promotion and start seeing it as a career pivot, like moving from accounting to landscape architecture. They are different disciplines.