Not the Manager Type? Maybe You’re a “Guru”

Not the Manager Type? Maybe You’re a “Guru”

For most of us, climbing the corporate ladder means first becoming a manager. Then, as your control extends over bigger teams, and eventually entire departments, you ascend in an organization’s hierarchy. Your career advancement therefore—in terms of title, pay and recognition—is inextricably tied to people management.

But does this decades-old approach to career development even make sense?

Managing people, after all, is a specific skill set. Not everyone excels at it or wants to excel at it. Pushing top performers through a one-size-fits-all management track may not be, at the end of the day, the most effective use of company resources.

Silicon Valley has long recognized this issue, while not exactly resolving it. Top tech organizations—the Googles and Facebooks and Apples of the world—are known for offering technical or specialist tracks for talented engineers who don’t aspire to management. But the problem is that these tracks are often ad-hoc, without a formal path forward. All too often, they’re dead ends. A star engineer might reach the apex of the technical track (and her earning potential) after a few years, with no choice but to switch over to management or pine away for the sole CTO position.

What’s missing, not just in the tech world but across the board, is a dedicated track—complete with titles, incremental pay raises and true upward potential—for exceptional performers who aren’t keen on managing people. These are the experts within an organization who have amassed a unique body of knowledge and who continually push their company to perform better. They may be leaders, but they lead by example, not by mandate. They inspire co-workers around them with their singular contributions rather than through direct instruction.

They are, in short, a company’s "gurus," in quite nearly the original sense of the word: people who extend knowledge and shine light where there is darkness. And for them we need something I’d like to call a guru track.

What is a guru track?

Advancement for gurus doesn’t involve assuming responsibility over bigger and bigger teams. Instead, gurus move up in an organization in other ways. They may be awarded the reins of progressively larger projects with bigger budgets, freed from daily responsibilities to work on new problems and product lines, asked to mentor promising new recruits or tapped as thought leaders. Promotions are based not on team performance but on individual impact within an organization and deepening or widening of skill sets. And, most importantly, gurus are in turn rewarded the same way as individuals on the management track—with new job titles, opportunities for training and professional development, enhanced pay and incentive packages and other perks.

The result is a potential win-win for employee and employer. Exceptional employees get to continue doing what they do best while also being given a clear path for advancement. The organization itself, in turn, improves its odds of retaining top talent, i.e. exactly those performers already making outsized contributions.

Since talent attracts talent, a virtuous recruitment cycle is set in motion: High-calibre candidates will line up to work alongside the right gurus. Plus, as thought leaders writing and speaking about their areas of expertise, gurus function as key brand ambassadors, drawing positive attention to the company and its corporate culture.

Rolling out the guru track

At Hootsuite, we’ve already rolled out a dedicated guru track with our engineering team. Intermediate-level developers are given the formal option of becoming either “lead engineers” and managing a team or “senior engineers” and deepening their own technical expertise. Each of these tracks offers the same opportunities for performance-based promotion. Gurus and managers alike steadily move up the ladder in terms of compensation, title and seniority, depending on results they achieve. It’s also important to note that employees can transition laterally from guru to manager and vice-versa, without losing status: In fact, some of our most senior people have switched several times.

But a guru track has applications well beyond the world of engineering, which is why we’re deploying it organization-wide, to all of our 700-plus employees. There’s no reason a star salesperson needs to become a sales manager or a brilliant designer needs to end up managing a creative team if that’s not the path they want to pursue. Our goal is to ensure that top performers are incentivized and stick around for the long haul, regardless of how many people report to them. In the end, it’s the yin-yang between managers and gurus that ensures any organization’s success: gurus envision change, managers implement it; gurus look toward the horizon, managers see the bottom line; gurus rock the boat, managers steady it.

We’re far from the first company to recognize this dynamic. What we’ve strived to do is formalize it. Any of our employees can become gurus, not just the odd genius engineer whom we’re desperate to keep at any cost. The guru track is clearly defined, with transparent performance criteria for promotion and raises. And it’s anything but a dead end. Gurus can advance all the way to the apex of the org chart and—if they want—jump over to the management side at any stage.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you prefer a guru or manager track?

*****

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Image: Hootsuite

Very interesting, I'd love to see this more often, but I wary that developing people skills might not be seen as one of the key requirements of working within an organisation which strives to achieve goals through bringing people together. If you can ensure this is part of the path it could be a fantastic way to integrate the technocrats and the managers.

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Suzi Milovic

HR Business Partner at Blackwoods, Wesfarmers Industrial and Safety

6y

Brilliant !

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Elaine Y.

HR Ninja ★ People Cultivator ★ Intrapreneur

8y

Love this! Not everyone aspires to be a manager. Star performers contribute in different ways. As the workplace evolves, companies need to look at leveraging talent in ways that benefits the company and understand people can't be fit standard career paths.

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