Can You ‘Unboss’ Yourself Without Ruining Your Career?

Sick of managing people? Maybe you should stop.

So many of us stumble into being the boss, or raise our hands because it feels like the only way to get ahead. We’re attracted to the cachet of the title, the promise of more money or the comfort of having a ladder to ascend.

Then come the performance reviews to write, the team drama to adjudicate, the meetings to attend . The job keeps getting harder. Managers oversee nearly three times as many people today as they did in 2017, according to data from research and advisory firm Gartner . Nearly one in five managers says that, given a choice, they’d prefer not to oversee people.

“That’s what we call buyer’s remorse,” says Swagatam Basu , a senior director in Gartner’s human-resources practice.

You can switch back. And your company might be amenable. More are “unbossing” their workplaces by shrinking middle-management layers .

The trick is figuring out a way to maintain your pay and influence. In some companies, the number of people you manage is a proxy for your power. Others now use special individual-contributor tracks, meant to ensure that technical experts have a set path to climb.

You might have to give something up. Making the shift could still feel like a relief.

“It was like, oh, I don’t have to deal with the people issues,” says Suzet McKinney , an executive at Sterling Bay, a Chicago real-estate company. She’d served in leadership positions before. When she started her current role in 2021—no pay cut required—she figured she’d eventually hire direct reports and build out a team. Then she realized she didn’t miss it.

“Managing people would be more of a distraction,” she says.

Making the ask

Dennis Henry , an engineering director overseeing about 45 staffers, was hungry to move to the next managerial rung at software company Okta last year. Then his supervisor explained that would mean even less time to do the technical work he loved. It made the 38-year-old wonder: Did he want to be a boss at all?

“What would hurt more?” Henry asked himself. Giving up managing or giving up coding? The latter felt unfathomable.

He pondered what he’d want if he left management entirely and became an individual contributor, ranking priorities. Maintaining his base salary—just shy of $300,000—was tops. He told his boss that he was happy to stay in his current role if a new opportunity didn’t pan out.

“You have to be ready to hear ‘no,’ ” the Orlando, Fla., resident says.

He got a yes: The company created a new job for him and preserved his pay. After 15 years as a manager, carving out a new kind of authority has been a transition.

As a boss, “I could just say, ‘Do this,’ ” he says. Now he spends more time amassing evidence for his ideas, making his case.

“It is so much harder to convince people that something is the best option,” he says.

The stress of managing

Jenny Blake ’s mental health took a dive after she was promoted to team lead at Google at age 24. She felt stressed and emotionally drained, deeply responsible for her team but beholden to decisions from above, like a department reorganisation ordered up by executives.

A 2024 survey from SHRM, a lobby for human-resources professionals, found that 40% of respondents said their mental health declined when they took on a managerial or leadership role.

Blake switched to an individual contributor job, spending several years rolling out new programs she felt had a much bigger impact than her management. Now an author and speaker focused on careers and business, she recommends broaching the transition conversation by laying out your unique strengths and how they can better serve the company in a new role. Don’t dwell on your distaste for managing people.

Want to ensure the shift isn’t a demotion? Make sure you’re staying close to parts of the business that are directly tied to revenue, she says. Build your reputation externally, speaking at conferences and publishing papers.

“Become an industry expert,” she says.

The reality of switching

Just because a company touts opportunities for individual contributors to grow doesn’t mean you’ll be able to rise to the top unimpeded. A former consultant at a professional-services firm told me that partners who didn’t have their own teams were treated like second-class citizens.

At Launch Potato, a digital-media company based in Delray Beach, Fla., the individual-contributor track tops out several levels below the executive level. Even on the lower rungs, managers have the opportunity to make higher salaries and bonuses than commensurate individual contributors, says Kristopher Osborne , the company’s senior vice president of talent.

“You are getting paid a premium to deal with a lot more issues and challenges,” he says of managers. “People have to be realistic.”

He recommends ambitious individual contributors show they’re bringing leadership to the company in different ways. Can you run strategy initiatives, coach teammates or get swaths of the organization on board with new initiatives?

Letting go

In a previous job, Sheri Byrne-Haber liked managing people and being a “one-stop shop” for her 20-person digital-accessibility department, even as the workload ballooned. So when her boss suggested splitting her role in two, she initially said no.

She reconsidered when performance-review season arrived. She had to write 19.

The company hired a new counterpart for her, charged with managing, and Byrne-Haber focused on strategy. Letting go was harder than she expected. It took her three months to unsubscribe from all the manager-only Slack channels, email lists and meetings she had been looped in on. When colleagues reached out with questions, she’d pause to determine whether the queries were still related to her responsibilities. If not, she forced herself to forward them to the new manager, even when she knew the answer.

“It felt awkward,” says Byrne-Haber, now at work on her own startup. “But that’s not my job anymore.”

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

Can You ‘Unboss’ Yourself Without Ruining Your Career?

Managers want to shed the headache of running a team without losing pay and power

Making the ask

The stress of managing

The reality of switching

Letting go

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.