Pretty much every company I’ve been in or know of values a vertical trajectory instead of a horizontal one for its employees i.e becoming a manager nearly always means a faster salary progression than becoming an expert in one or multiple fields.
Why is expertise valued less?
Visibility
Because it takes a lot more than expertise to get anything done at large scale.
That doesn’t explain why leadership is valued more.
That’s an argument for both existing. Without leadership the expertise won’t be harnessed, without expertise, leadership means nothing.
Weil Kapitalismus primär ein Verteilungs- und Anreizwerkzeug ist, kein Qualitätsgenerator. Allerdings sehen wir, wie das System beginnt sich selbst zu verdauen, wie es jedes noch so gut gemeinte System tut, sobald es einseitig bespielt wird und kippt.
This is a better question than it first seems, mostly because I think there’s two questions in there.
From a business perspective, you want well compensated managers so they don’t steal from you.
(Slightly) Less cynically: managers work with maximising business outputs, their job is to align, optimise and synergise production at lowest cost. They would argue that they enable more value than most individual contributors and that their slice of the added value thus becomes larger.
As for why that trajectory is pushed, I believe that is an emergent phenomenon, not designed, as a consequence of that compensation structure, and the transferability of management skills.
There is also the status aspect, in all groups, the leader has more status (=better), but the trajectory goes beyond acting leader (you don’t always have the same positive view of your bosses boss) so that will only push you to the next step, but that might be enough to create the ladder.
Philosophically, a business doesn’t actually need any particular expert or manager, it needs a competitive advantage. This could be through the best parts, but could just as well be through better design, marketing, sales, costs, or pricing.
If the pay scale was fair, you’d want to be someone who adds capability: can you produce 2x as the other technicians? Then you’d be capped at just under 2x base salary. Can you make the product sell where it otherwise couldn’t? You’re now capped only by the total profits.
That capability is probably easiest to get and sustain through management/organising skills, but a virtuoso technician, inspired designer, genius marketer or wizard salesman could also carry the business.
Nobody values actual competent leadership, they just pretend they do, they cosplay that that’s what they’re into.
People value kissing up to your boss, being type A, being faux-jovial, having no life outside of work, being attractive and charming, and most importantly, having connected friends.
MBAs are the idiots who couldn’t actually learn real math or some subset of practical applied physics, but wanted to be important in a business.
They’re the ones who just make up bullshit and believe it untill it becomes reality. This generates not so much technical debt, as literal debt, malinvestment, capital misallocation, financial risk.
But, they don’t pay that risk, they fire everyone to pay for their mistakes, their delusions.
And then when they do that, that is called ‘leadership’.
Why is this the paradigm?
Because our society is deeply, deeply corrupt and fradulent, all the way through.
It doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t have the ability to influence people and get your good plan/product/idea executed
Because leadership is the key to accessing expert labor. Capital interfaces with leadership leadership interfaces with experts. Experts are lower on the totem pole. We never stopped being a feudal society. Some of the rules changed around capital but the existing power structures absorbed them
“Carl over here is really good at making wheels. But he’s only made the 4 of them. Won’t make any more unless we give him a reason to… Ideas?”
Annnnnd 5000 years later; mortgages, wage slavery, and “let’s have an all hands to realign with our core paradigm”
Because leaders are the ones who decide what is valuable.
Because leadership ability is much easier to fake.
At the end of the day, a single person can only do so much work. All the experience in the world doesn’t change that there is only 24hrs in a day.
A good leader can enable a team of people to work together achieving more than the sum of their individual contributions.
Leaders are force multiplier, and good ones should be compensated as such.
Sadly, we also over compensate the shitty leaders far too often as well :/
I hate when people use “also” and “as well” in the same sentence, and I die inside when I catch myself doing it. Not hating on you, just suffering flashbacks.
Why?
Redundancy, and not like the good hardware kind.
I am not a good sentencer :(
We all could learn to words more gooder.
I’ve thought for a while adults should go back to school every ten years or so for some basic logic, driving, communication, and math refreshers.
I can get behind that. Even more frequently perhaps. Its insane that for a task as dangerous as driving, once you pass at 18, you don’t get re-tested until you kill someone…
I have to do anti-sexual harassment training every year for work, communication/math/logic refreshers once a year would actually be a lot more beneficial.
Leadership is undoubtedly important and good leadership even more so, but why do you bring singularity (“one person can only do so much work”)? Experts work in teams too. Is there some kind of connotation with expertise that leads you (or people) to believe that is something which cannot be brought into a team?
A good leader can enable a team of people to work together achieving more than the sum of their individual contributions.
That is true, but isn’t the ability of the team members important too? For example, if you have a team of juniors, you can get to a goal, however the question is in what state. And if the leader is just a leader but doesn’t have understanding of the sector, why should their leadership be valued more than that of the team members who do?
As for force multipliers, experts can be force multipliers too. An expert that helps out and resolves (or even prevents) tricky situations for fellow team members (or the entire team) can improve team cohesion and productivity. Experts also often have an educative role in the team to spread knowledge and understanding. That seems to be valued less, and I don’t understand why.
All the answers are bullshit. The real explanation is that leaders set salaries. Of course they’re going to value themselves over others. Then they’re going to rationalise it with the bullshit you see in this thread about “force multipliers” etc… it’s basic capitalism. It’s the same reason politicians in the us have free healthcare and great vacation and benefits and salaries rising above inflation, the people who control these things always make sure they get what’s fair then make excuses for why no one else does.
Watch the so-called “leaders” down vote for being called out. Workers do the work, “leaders” get the pay, owners get the profit. Why? Because the “leaders” are the tools of the capitalist class to exploit workers so they get rewarded. Basic capitalism.
I think you’re confusing leadership with administration. Generally the boots-on-the-ground leaders aren’t the ones making salary decisions.
All your examples involve teams, and teams don’t typically happen without some form of leadership from someone. An expert without leadership skills will be far less effective at building a team around them than someone with the expertise and the leadership skills.
The expert your describing in your last paragragh IS a leader. If they aren’t being compensated as such, thats just them being exploited, and they need to advocate for more appropriate compensation.
Are you just unlucky in your experiences? Expert team leads can absolutely make as much as managers.
But there’s a convergence as you spend more and more time making decisions and directing others that you will effectively be a manager.
I used to scoff at the idea of “leaders” until I experienced good leadership and learned the difference between lead and manage.
I suspect a lot of people here think they mean the same thing.
Here’s a point though; to build vertical experience as an expert I’m starting to suspect that one would be less subject to changing companies.
Whereas leaders have no need to stay in place and change more often.
And one typically increases their compensation package much faster via changes of employer.
Just my thoughts contemplating that I just reached the low bar on my function band as a coe lead after 8 damn years into the function. Loyalty isn’t rewarded.
Leadership takes effort and focus.
Having worked in orgs where everyone is expected to lead at different times, I can tell you that leading takes effort and focus - that’s effort and focus that’s not spent on your area of expertise.
Good leaders spend all their effort on making a team work better - no different than a good coach.
There’s 24h in a day for leaders too. A leader cannot achieve infinite output by being infinitely good, just like an expert cannot achieve infinite output by being infinitely good.
Expertise is also a force multiplier.
A single expert in a team of juniors can do so much more. Because it can delegate the junior work to the juniors while doing only expert work. Thus ending up with more expert work done.
Your last paragragh describes a leader…
A single expert in a team of juniors can do so much more. Because it can delegate the junior work to the juniors while doing only expert work.
This part is definitely true but I think it misses the point. A single expert can be a force multiplier, or they can be overbearing dead weight. There is the possibility a technical expert wants to micromanage and see every step as it is done (thus holding up work that can be done while the expert is elsewhere).
I conjecture that those skills and attributes that separate the two experts we’ve described is what “good leadership” consists of.
I would never trust a leader who has no technical skills, but neither would I trust a leader who has only technical skills.
You can also have shit leaders that micromanage. What even is your point?
Being a technical expert != being a good leader
There are a set of skills and attributes that enable one to leader well. An ideal leader will have both technical skills and leadership capability, but it is possible for each to exist independently in a person.
The higher you get up in a company, the more it will be about running the company instead of what the company does in detail. While we all have our gripes with middle and upper management, such a structure will come naturally with a growing company. Really small companies often have owners and management, who are themselves experts in the field. For bigger companies that is not really achievable and not even wanted, since management has a lot to manage.
When you become an expert and want to climb the latter, then some management will automatically come to you. You will be asked to lead colleagues more junior than you. You will be asked to manage strategy for your field of expertise. You will be asked to assess the effort needed to handle projects and the risk assiciated with them. This already means quite some management work. The reward is, that (if you do a good job) those under you will be able to do a better job and that they have time to themselves become experts by doing the technical work.
Thats my current situation. In my IT job I have to do all of the above to guide the project into success while giving some of the technical work to those more junior. For some this is good. Though I personally probably won’t go much further into management positions, because I don’t like that work enough.
From the owners’ (shareholders’) point of view, managers are on their side to extract values from workers. Of course there are more nuances in real life, but that’s a more plausible explanation than any of the meritocracy ones.
Because leadership makes the rules, why would you be surprised that those rules value the people who made them?
People management is harder than it seems. Getting the people working for you to be happy and high performing is not hard but balancing those needs across a whole team becomes challenging. 5 people trying to coordinate a schedule is really tough - ask any gaming group about availability. A big 15 person team is more than 3 times as hard.
Leadership is also much harder to learn than experience. Experience is just surviving the ordeal and knowing how to get through it better. It’s persistence and observation as you solve the problems as they pop up.
Leadership is knowing who to talk to, how to appeal to a person, how to read social cues and pick up on unspoken behavior. A team member is equally capable of building the team as they are of poisoning the team. Good leaders can recognize talent and temperament that gels with the existing people. You’re effectively picking other peoples’ friends. (And not such good friends that no work gets done)
Experience can be taught. Leadership has to be learned.
And yet not everyone can become a nuclear engineer or rocket scientist, programm architect, lawyer and so on, so your “experience can be taught, leadership has to be learned” falls apart pretty quickly.
Leadership is not in anyway less then any other job that you can become an expert in. It is just focused on social sciences instead of engineering for example and both can be taught. It’s dumb to say that leadership is something special, its just that it is the more accessible of fields that have a high skill ceiling as it is present in pretty much every work environment.
Tldr, I think your end point is dumb, but I do agree that people management is hard and is definitely a skill. The best leaders are experts in their own right and it is just a matter of contextualising leadership as a skill you can become an expert in.
The value of experience is logarithmic. You’re going to learn far less in the tenth year of doing something than the first year. Since management usually doesn’t start at year one, they are still in the part of the curve that rises faster.
Also, a lot of the value in higher levels of experience is usually management adjacent, like knowing what order to perform different tasks on a project and identifying when there may be issues beforehand. Someone who remains an individual contributor isn’t going to be providing value for technical roles adjacent to management.
