An excellent engineer may be promoted to section manager and suddenly spend more time in meetings and supervising employees than doing technical work. To someone outside Japan, this can look like taking the most capable person away from the job they do best. In many Japanese companies, however, this was long seen as a perfectly normal promotion.
Employees who performed well and gained experience were often expected to move on to positions where they managed people or an entire department. Technical employees were no exception. When a highly respected engineer became a manager, the usual reaction was not, “Why are they being given a completely different job?” It was more likely to be, “That is what promotion looks like.”
This did not necessarily mean that companies believed technical ability automatically made someone good at managing people. The deeper reason was that, in many companies, becoming a manager was once the main way to receive a higher salary and greater status. If a company wanted to reward an excellent engineer with a more senior position, promoting that person into management may have been the only clear path available.
But doing highly skilled work yourself and managing the work of others require different abilities. Someone may be excellent at solving technical problems but struggle to delegate tasks, develop junior employees, settle disagreements, or bring different opinions together. It is not unusual for a person who was outstanding as an engineer to have difficulty after becoming a manager.
The employee may not want the change either. Moving into management can mean leaving behind the technical work they enjoyed and spending much more time in meetings, staffing decisions, and coordination. It may also bring heavier responsibility, longer working hours, having to deal with work on days off, or a greater chance of being transferred to another location. Someone who values time with their family may have understandable reasons for not wanting that kind of promotion.
Even so, simply saying, “I do not want to manage people,” can make an employee appear unambitious or uninterested in advancing. Some people therefore explain their choice more positively, saying that they want to continue contributing to the company by developing their expertise.
Today, some companies offer separate career tracks for managers and technical specialists. When specialists can also receive higher pay, greater recognition, and promotion, a company no longer has to move every excellent engineer into a role they may not be suited for. Allowing technical employees to advance while continuing to deepen their expertise benefits not only the employees themselves, but also companies that want to maintain a high level of technical ability within the organization.