Build Two Career Ladders, Not One

By Naomi Withers | WBN News | October 14, 2026 Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free

Every business has a ladder, and in most of them it only goes up one way. Individual contributor, then manager, then senior manager, then out of management altogether into something we call leadership.

That single ladder quietly costs owners their best people.

Two Different Skillsets Wearing One Word

Management and leadership get used almost interchangeably, and they describe different work.

Management is detail, process and consistency. It is the person who removes obstacles, clarifies expectations, and builds the structure that lets everyone else do good work.

Leadership is direction, ambiguity and change. It is the person who asks whether you should be doing this at all.

One stabilizes. The other disrupts. Both are essential, and they are two different capabilities.

Gallup's research on managers finds that about one person in ten has high talent to manage. Leadership talent sits separately and is also uncommon. Somebody who has both to a high standard is rarer than either one alone, which is the part most organizational charts are quietly built to ignore.

How A Manager Usually Gets Made

You take your best individual contributor, the one who hits the numbers, and you promote them.

The promotion rewards how good they were at the job. Whether they have any aptitude for managing people rarely comes up.

Then, when the newly promoted manager struggles, the assumption is that they are not being strategic enough. So they get promoted again.

Now you have taken somebody who was never set up to manage and asked them to lead.

The Manager You Are About To Lose

Think about the operations person in your business who delivers everything on time, whose team has almost no turnover, and who keeps the whole place running.

Move them into a role built on strategic ambiguity and long vision meetings where nothing gets decided, and one of two things happens. They are miserable and they leave, or they stay and you have traded an exceptional manager for an average leader.

The question nobody asks first is whether they wanted the job.

We carry an assumption that good managers should aspire to lead, that management is a waystation on the way to something better. Management is not a lesser calling. It is a different one.

What A Second Ladder Looks Like

For a business of thirty or sixty people, the fix is a second track that goes up, and it needs no restructure.

Give it real titles. Principal, Senior, Lead. Make them mean something on a business card.

Pay for expertise. Somebody with fifteen years of execution excellence can be worth what a director is worth, and paying them that way is cheaper than replacing them.

Promote on demonstrated capability. Watch how somebody coaches before you hand them a team.

And build pairs. A visionary owner with a strong operations partner is the structure working as designed.

Why It Matters

Small businesses feel this more sharply than large ones, because losing one exceptional manager is felt by everyone in the building.

The single-ladder design forces a choice nobody wants to say out loud. Stay where you are good and watch your pay stall, or move up into work that does not suit you. Most people take the second option, and the cost lands later, on the payroll.

Two ladders cost you an afternoon of design work and one compensation decision. One ladder costs you the person.

Adapted from an article first published on the Growth Consultant Services blog: Two Rare Breeds: Why Good Managers and Good Leaders Require Different Skillsets

About The Author

Naomi Withers | WBN News LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-withers-7044491b/

Naomi Withers is the founder of Growth Consultant Services, where she advises founders, CEOs, and executive teams on AI strategy, executive coaching, and high-performance leadership. Her advisory and coaching work is at growthconsultantservices.com/services.

Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free

Tags: #Naomi Withers #WBN News #Leadership #Management #Career Development #Small Business