Even an employee with outstanding results in the field may not automatically move into a higher position. Some Japanese companies want future managers to spend time at headquarters or in other departments before taking on more senior roles.
One reason is that the nature of the job changes as a person moves up. A salesperson may be judged mainly on the results they produce in their own territory. A department manager or branch manager, however, cannot focus only on their own numbers. They may have to think about budgets and staffing, coordinate with other departments, and make decisions while keeping the company’s overall direction in mind.
Working at headquarters can make it easier to see how the company operates as a whole. Employees learn how different departments are connected, what senior management considers when making decisions, and who needs to be involved before something can move forward. That kind of experience may be seen as useful preparation for someone who will later be responsible for a larger part of the organization.
Knowing who does what inside the company also matters. Someone who has worked with managers from different departments may know who to consult when a problem comes up. This is not simply about having connections. In a large organization, knowing how to get different parts of the company to work together can be genuinely useful.
For this reason, when a highly regarded employee at a regional branch is transferred to headquarters, it is not necessarily a demotion. In some companies, the move may be part of preparing that person for a future leadership position. After gaining experience at headquarters and returning to the field, the employee may be seen as better prepared to become a branch manager or department head.
But there is a point where this can start to feel unfair. If simply having “headquarters experience” starts to matter more than years of strong performance in the field, people may understandably question the system. Headquarters should not become a special badge that guarantees promotion regardless of what the employee actually learned or accomplished there.
Headquarters experience matters not because headquarters is inherently more important, but because it can expose employees to parts of the job that strong individual results alone cannot show.
