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.”