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?
Problem being is that I don’t see us rewarding good leadership, so much as rewarding having a huge ego and being a sociopath.
Generally the most well rewarded executives I’ve dealt with provided no actionable leadership, but claimed they were amazing leaders while tossing out useless pointy haired boss fodder. Last week was in a meeting where someone was stating plainly what we needed to do about something and the executive cuts him off mid sentence to say “we need to figure out what we need to do and then do it”. Yes, we were in the middle of that but he needed to interject to claim that it was his idea. He cut off another team describing what they did and he said “why didn’t you just use ai? It would be done already and you wouldn’t need the people working on it”. Note this was a very very AI heavy team already, because he had already mandated it and he thinks they are lying because things aren’t magically happening.
I’ve occasionally seen good leadership, With actionable awareness of the customer and work and ability to keep things on track and not fall into the trap of just spewing business jargon. Usually they get undermined by some incompetent who sees them as a threat and the upper tier is infested by people who deal with the hollow jargon and thus will tend to believe a fellow jargon speaker. So they get sidelined or quit.