"Success" should not mean "Management"

We might all say that career success should be measured by how fulfilled you are on the job, but in practice, most people and companies still measure success by how high you climbed the corporate ladder. Clawed yourself near the top of the org chart? You ARE successful. But if you're not on a leadership track, playing the "my number of direct reports is bigger than yours" game, you're probably not. We all know this is lunacy, especially in the tech world, so why do so many companies still have only a single path for promotions? You either move into management or your career (pay, benefits, perks, control, etc.) stands still.

Isn't it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?

And isn't it about time more companies started offering multiple career tracks, where management is no more valuable or important than the highly-skilled work of an individual contributor? (Sun is a good example of a company that offers two clear paths--one for management, and one for individual contributors who'd rather bathe cats than be a boss.)

What happens when a company gives an employee no option for growth other than management? Yes, lots of individual contributors (even programmers) want the challenge of a management role, but some of the best feel forced into trading the work they love best for more "advancement opportunities". How senseless is it to take a star programmer and make her do Gantt charts? How lame it is to take your best designer and make him run budget meetings, review TPS reports, and consolidate time sheets?

This post was partly inspired by Anne 2.0's Where Are The Women Redux, which (among other things) talks about conferences that claim they can't find enough women speakers because their aren't enough women in those top leadership roles. Anne makes a fabulous point with:
"It’s no surprise that you might find more “smart” women speakers elsewhere than in the upper reaches of large tech and media companies. Part of being smart is weighing your options and making tradeoffs. Women face a radically different opportunity landscape than do men. I’m not going to say one or the other landscape is better–they’re different. But if you care about having more women as speakers at your tech conference, you might have to go with someone other than a senior level executive or dealmaker type."

So, yes, I'm thinking that we should wean ourselves from evaluating professional success on management level (even if it's within a company we started and own). Rather than asking about someone's rank, position, job title, number of direct reports, power, etc. we should focus on one simple question: how closely does the work you do match the work you want to do? We should start thinking of ways to make sure that kick-ass individual contributors can be compensated just as well as managers, so that they aren't torn between getting a promotion that sucks (into management) or sticking with what they're good at and love, for less pay.

[And yes, I realize that this is all way over-simplified with tons of big, tricky issues including the whole ugly mess about how some jobs (engineers) are considered so much more valuable than others (teachers), etc. But even if I were smart enough to take that all on (I'm not), we can't do it all in one blog.]

We should start thinking in Venn diagrams instead of hierarchical org charts. But I want to know what you think--I've seen this from only one side--as an individual contributor who'd rather program in punch cards than do an Employee Performance Review.