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.”

The best financial advice many Australians are receiving right now is not coming from licensed advisers charging by the hour. It is coming through a phone screen, in the ten minutes between work and dinner, from creators who have built credibility the hard way: by being right, being transparent, and being specific in a space where vagueness has always been the easy default.

This is not a ranking by follower count. Follower count is a measure of distribution, not of quality. What follows is a ranking by substance — credentials, accuracy, community depth, and the quality of what an audience actually learns from following these accounts. The distinction matters, because the Australians acting on this content are making real financial decisions with real money.

1- Queenie Tan – Corporate Authorised Representative; Co-Founder & Director, Invest With Queenie & Billroo

There are finance influencers who talk about building wealth, and there are those who document it in real time with receipts. Queenie Tan belongs firmly in the second category. Starting from a $400-per-week income, Tan built her net worth past $1 million while publishing the actual numbers — income, savings rate, investment decisions — for an audience of more than 400,000 across platforms.

She is a Corporate Authorised Representative, co-founder of the personal finance app Billroo, and the author of a book that has become a practical reference for young Australians navigating ETFs, superannuation and property. What separates her from the crowded field of money educators is precision: she does not talk in principles when she can talk in percentages.

2- Alan Kohler – Editor-in-Chief, Eureka Report; Editor-in-Chief, InvestSMART Group; ABC News finance presenter, host of Inside Business.

If Queenie Tan represents the new wave of personal finance creators, Alan Kohler represents something the new wave will spend decades trying to build: institutional credibility that has survived multiple economic cycles. As Editor-in-Chief of the Eureka Report and InvestSMART Group, and a decades-long presence on ABC News, Kohler has spent more than thirty years making financial analysis accessible without dumbing it down.

His coverage of RBA decisions, market movements and economic policy is cited by podcasters, journalists and fund managers alike. He is not chasing virality. He does not need to.

3- Aleks Nikolic – Corporate lawyer; host, Big Swinging Stocks podcast

Most finance creators address the mechanics of money. Aleks Nikolic addresses the psychology — and that distinction explains why her following is as loyal as it is. Operating as Broke Girl Wealth across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Nikolic covers ETFs, crypto and investment strategy, but her real differentiator is a willingness to discuss the emotional architecture of financial decision-making.

Shame around debt. Fear around market volatility. The limiting beliefs that stop people acting on what they already know. In a space where confidence is routinely performed, her candour is a genuine competitive advantage.

4- Bryce Leske & Alec Renehan – Equity Mates Media

Equity Mates did not build a following. They built a media company. What began as a podcast by two friends learning to invest has grown into Australia’s most established investing media brand, covering ASX stocks, ETFs, global markets and fund manager interviews across podcast, social and YouTube.

The longevity is the credential. Equity Mates has operated through multiple market cycles, a global pandemic, and a generational shift in how Australians engage with investing — and its audience has grown through all of it. When the hosts speak, their listeners know they have been paying attention for years.

5- The Lazy CEO – CEO & Founder, Showpo; Shark Tank Australia investor

The metric that matters most on social media is not followers — it is engagement, because engagement signals trust. Jane Lu, known as The Lazy CEO, maintains an engagement rate of approximately 1.15 per cent on Instagram, which is exceptional for a finance account of his size. Her 242,000-plus followers are not passive consumers: they ask questions, share experiences and apply what they read.

Her content focuses on business finance and wealth building, and the active comment sections are the clearest possible evidence that her audience does not merely scroll past.

6- Tash Invests – Founder, Tash Lends; Forbes Australia 30 Under 30

Tash Invests built her following on a premise that sounds simple but is rarer in practice than it should be: she publishes the actual numbers. Not approximations or ranges or anonymised case studies — her salary, her savings rate, her portfolio value, her net worth, updated and on the record.

Having bought her first property at twenty-two and grown her documented net worth past $1 million, she has become the primary reference point for young Australians trying to understand what building wealth on a moderate income genuinely looks like. The specificity is the product.

7- David Scutt – APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group

The authority of most finance social media content rests on research and reading. David Scutt‘s authority rests on having done the job. A former Treasury Dealer at Arab Bank and the Commonwealth Bank, former ASX Business Supervisor, and former Global Markets Editor at Business Insider Australia and anchor at ausbiz TV, Scutt now brings that direct market experience to his role as APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group, rather than relying on secondary commentary.

When he discusses foreign exchange movements or ASX dynamics, it is not because he has read about them. It is because he has traded them.

8- Meddy Demars – Investing & crypto content creator

The gap Meddy Demars fills is specific and underserviced: connecting global macroeconomic events to the practical reality of Australian investors. When the US Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates, when inflation data moves, when commodity prices shift — most Australian finance content either ignores the local implications or translates them poorly.

Demars, operating across TikTok and Instagram from Sydney, does the translation well: explaining what global conditions mean for Australian stocks, savings rates and investment portfolios in terms that are accessible without being condescending.

9- Simran Kaur – Founder, Friends That Invest

Friends That Invest is arguably the most successful community-building exercise in Australian personal finance, and Simran Kaur is the reason why. The New Zealand-based creator — whose audience is predominantly Australian — built a podcast, a book and a social media presence around a single insight: that the personal finance world was not speaking to young women, and that the consequences of that gap were significant.

The measurable cultural shift that followed — women engaging with investing concepts in communities that had not previously existed — is the kind of impact that most financial literacy programmes aim for and rarely achieve.

10- Effie Zahos – Money Editor at 9News

Effie Zahos is one of Australia’s most recognised financial commentators, appearing regularly across 9News, A Current Affair, Today and Today Extra as 9News Money Editor. Her role puts everyday money questions, from mortgage rates to cost-of-living pressures, in front of a national broadcast audience.

Before television, she spent years as editor of Money magazine, building the editorial foundation for her current commentary. She is also Director and Money Commentator at InvestSMART, an ambassador for Canstar, and a published author, with her financial advice available in print as well as on screen.

That combination, decades of editorial experience, an active broadcast presence, and a body of published work, is what makes her commentary carry weight beyond any single platform or post.

The common thread across this list is not follower count or platform presence. It is that each creator has built an audience willing to act on what they say, and for the Australians making financial decisions off the back of this content, that trust is the only thing that actually matters.

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

The voices reshaping how Australians think about money — and why credibility matters more than reach.