“Conscious unbossing” got its name a couple of years ago, when a Robert Walters survey found most young professionals didn’t want to become middle managers. Whether Gen Z actually acts on it is a fair question. Plenty of them still take the manager job, and I get it, the raise for managing is 11% versus 7% for staying an individual contributor, per Glassdoor. But the instinct is real. I know because I had it too, and I’m a former CMO.
Senior people are stepping off the management track and going back to doing the work themselves. From the outside it looks like a demotion, so people don’t advertise it. In tech, where the data is best, it already has a name: SignalFire calls it the “Super IC,” and top individual contributors are starting to get paid like directors. Most of the examples are engineers. I came at it from marketing.
