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At the end of the day, a single person can only do so much work. All the experience in the world doesn't change that there is only 24hrs in a day.
A good leader can enable a team of people to work together achieving more than the sum of their individual contributions.
Leaders are force multiplier, and good ones should be compensated as such.
Sadly, we also over compensate the shitty leaders far too often as well :/
Leadership is undoubtedly important and good leadership even more so, but why do you bring singularity ("one person can only do so much work")? Experts work in teams too. Is there some kind of connotation with expertise that leads you (or people) to believe that is something which cannot be brought into a team?
A good leader can enable a team of people to work together achieving more than the sum of their individual contributions.
That is true, but isn't the ability of the team members important too? For example, if you have a team of juniors, you can get to a goal, however the question is in what state. And if the leader is just a leader but doesn't have understanding of the sector, why should their leadership be valued more than that of the team members who do?
As for force multipliers, experts can be force multipliers too. An expert that helps out and resolves (or even prevents) tricky situations for fellow team members (or the entire team) can improve team cohesion and productivity. Experts also often have an educative role in the team to spread knowledge and understanding. That seems to be valued less, and I don't understand why.
All your examples involve teams, and teams don't typically happen without some form of leadership from someone. An expert without leadership skills will be far less effective at building a team around them than someone with the expertise and the leadership skills.
The expert your describing in your last paragragh IS a leader. If they aren't being compensated as such, thats just them being exploited, and they need to advocate for more appropriate compensation.
Are you just unlucky in your experiences? Expert team leads can absolutely make as much as managers.
But there’s a convergence as you spend more and more time making decisions and directing others that you will effectively be a manager.
I used to scoff at the idea of "leaders" until I experienced good leadership and learned the difference between lead and manage.
I suspect a lot of people here think they mean the same thing.
Leadership takes effort and focus.
Having worked in orgs where everyone is expected to lead at different times, I can tell you that leading takes effort and focus - that's effort and focus that's not spent on your area of expertise.
Good leaders spend all their effort on making a team work better - no different than a good coach.
Because leadership ability is much easier to fake.
High level and well paid experts do exist, particularly in tech companies. The reason it’s rare is because actual expertise requires both talent and effort. Very few people qualify.
Management is also a skill. And it’s arguable a more useful skill since it’s more transferable than a narrow focus. At very high levels you have a lot of responsibility figuring out where your company is headed.
Also traditional companies don’t typically have knowledge based employees. There’s a limit to what high expertise can bring. This is what has led to management as the promotion track.
I the pre-Jack Welch America, it was very common to have highly-skilled, very senior technical people making almost as much (and in some cases, more) than the CEO or the company president. This included architects, lawyers, accountants, engineers and any person that was deemed invaluable to the company.
Fuck Jack Welch and fuck MBAs.
Also it's important to clarify that leadership and management are different things.
Good leaders keep a team working together, motivated, going in the right direction, good management ensures a team prioritizes the tasks involved in going that direction.
Because leadership makes the rules, why would you be surprised that those rules value the people who made them?
The higher you get up in a company, the more it will be about running the company instead of what the company does in detail. While we all have our gripes with middle and upper management, such a structure will come naturally with a growing company. Really small companies often have owners and management, who are themselves experts in the field. For bigger companies that is not really achievable and not even wanted, since management has a lot to manage.
When you become an expert and want to climb the latter, then some management will automatically come to you. You will be asked to lead colleagues more junior than you. You will be asked to manage strategy for your field of expertise. You will be asked to assess the effort needed to handle projects and the risk assiciated with them. This already means quite some management work. The reward is, that (if you do a good job) those under you will be able to do a better job and that they have time to themselves become experts by doing the technical work.
Thats my current situation. In my IT job I have to do all of the above to guide the project into success while giving some of the technical work to those more junior. For some this is good. Though I personally probably won't go much further into management positions, because I don't like that work enough.
Nobody values actual competent leadership, they just pretend they do, they cosplay that that's what they're into.
People value kissing up to your boss, being type A, being faux-jovial, having no life outside of work, being attractive and charming, and most importantly, having connected friends.
MBAs are the idiots who couldn't actually learn real math or some subset of practical applied physics, but wanted to be important in a business.
They're the ones who just make up bullshit and believe it untill it becomes reality. This generates not so much technical debt, as literal debt, malinvestment, capital misallocation, financial risk.
But, they don't pay that risk, they fire everyone to pay for their mistakes, their delusions.
And then when they do that, that is called 'leadership'.
Why is this the paradigm?
Because our society is deeply, deeply corrupt and fradulent, all the way through.
People management is harder than it seems. Getting the people working for you to be happy and high performing is not hard but balancing those needs across a whole team becomes challenging. 5 people trying to coordinate a schedule is really tough - ask any gaming group about availability. A big 15 person team is more than 3 times as hard.
Leadership is also much harder to learn than experience. Experience is just surviving the ordeal and knowing how to get through it better. It's persistence and observation as you solve the problems as they pop up.
Leadership is knowing who to talk to, how to appeal to a person, how to read social cues and pick up on unspoken behavior. A team member is equally capable of building the team as they are of poisoning the team. Good leaders can recognize talent and temperament that gels with the existing people. You're effectively picking other peoples' friends. (And not such good friends that no work gets done)
Experience can be taught. Leadership has to be learned.
The value of experience is logarithmic. You're going to learn far less in the tenth year of doing something than the first year. Since management usually doesn't start at year one, they are still in the part of the curve that rises faster.
Also, a lot of the value in higher levels of experience is usually management adjacent, like knowing what order to perform different tasks on a project and identifying when there may be issues beforehand. Someone who remains an individual contributor isn't going to be providing value for technical roles adjacent to management.
Because you are mistaking technical skill with people skills.
People who go up manglement chains have people skills. You don't want your middle manglement making decisions that technical people make.
Ideally you want a balance of both, pure people skills ends with poor technical decisions, pure technical ends with inability to get the other employees on board.
"Manglement". I like that. I'm gonna start using that to refer to the incompetent leadership at my workplace.
Maybe we're misunderstanding each other. I'm not talking about technical people going up the ladder. I'm asking why going up the ladder is valued more than becoming or being an expert on the ground.
Impact and risk.
Farther up the chain your decisions have broader impact, good or bad. Those kinds decisions have more value than decisions that have a much narrower range of effect.
As what my industry calls an SME(subject matter expert), at most my decisions effect one or two systems at a time, while a leadership decision impacts 10 or 100 (or more) people's focus/direction. This includes the risks - so their decisions have a much broader scope.
Visibility
From the owners' (shareholders') point of view, managers are on their side to extract values from workers. Of course there are more nuances in real life, but that's a more plausible explanation than any of the meritocracy ones.
Expertise takes effort to train/learn, but we know how to do it.
Leadership is much more difficult to teach, some would go so far as to say you can't really teach it - it's either innate in somone or they learned it through life.
As a very technical person who values expertise, even I recognize that leadership is more valuable because good leadership is rare.
Problem being is that I don't see us rewarding good leadership, so much as rewarding having a huge ego and being a sociopath.
Generally the most well rewarded executives I've dealt with provided no actionable leadership, but claimed they were amazing leaders while tossing out useless pointy haired boss fodder. Last week was in a meeting where someone was stating plainly what we needed to do about something and the executive cuts him off mid sentence to say "we need to figure out what we need to do and then do it". Yes, we were in the middle of that but he needed to interject to claim that it was his idea. He cut off another team describing what they did and he said "why didn't you just use ai? It would be done already and you wouldn't need the people working on it". Note this was a very very AI heavy team already, because he had already mandated it and he thinks they are lying because things aren't magically happening.
I've occasionally seen good leadership, With actionable awareness of the customer and work and ability to keep things on track and not fall into the trap of just spewing business jargon. Usually they get undermined by some incompetent who sees them as a threat and the upper tier is infested by people who deal with the hollow jargon and thus will tend to believe a fellow jargon speaker. So they get sidelined or quit.
Because it takes a lot more than expertise to get anything done at large scale.
That doesn't explain why leadership is valued more.
That's an argument for both existing. Without leadership the expertise won't be harnessed, without expertise, leadership means nothing.
I have worked for one truly amazing leader in my time. He earned my complete 100% trust and commitment. I don't think its possible to fully get the value a leader can bring to a team until you have a really good (or great) one.
Because leadership is the key to accessing expert labor. Capital interfaces with leadership leadership interfaces with experts. Experts are lower on the totem pole. We never stopped being a feudal society. Some of the rules changed around capital but the existing power structures absorbed them
Because at some point expertise is worth less than leadership. One person with expertise is still just one person, they can't usually achieve anywhere close to the same results as a team of people with good leadership. Leadership is a multiplier of expertise.
Managers and such get more facetime with their higher management which gets them access to better pay. VPs and the higher tier can see how much they get paid themselves so its easier to pay lower leadership more by comparison, while workers and experts are more removed and are limited to the managers budget
It's a lot easier, more reliable to promote your son to VP than Senior [blank] Engineer. Also, for some weird reason we could never have predicted if we wanted to create a more efficient and equitable system, the people who decide salary decided they should have the biggest salary by a lot.
Good leadership is dearly needed in the world and so we pay for even the hope that someone might be. Technical skills are important, but not as important
This is a better question than it first seems, mostly because I think there's two questions in there.
From a business perspective, you want well compensated managers so they don't steal from you.
(Slightly) Less cynically: managers work with maximising business outputs, their job is to align, optimise and synergise production at lowest cost. They would argue that they enable more value than most individual contributors and that their slice of the added value thus becomes larger.
As for why that trajectory is pushed, I believe that is an emergent phenomenon, not designed, as a consequence of that compensation structure, and the transferability of management skills.
There is also the status aspect, in all groups, the leader has more status (=better), but the trajectory goes beyond acting leader (you don't always have the same positive view of your bosses boss) so that will only push you to the next step, but that might be enough to create the ladder.
Philosophically, a business doesn't actually need any particular expert or manager, it needs a competitive advantage. This could be through the best parts, but could just as well be through better design, marketing, sales, costs, or pricing.
If the pay scale was fair, you'd want to be someone who adds capability: can you produce 2x as the other technicians? Then you'd be capped at just under 2x base salary. Can you make the product sell where it otherwise couldn't? You're now capped only by the total profits.
That capability is probably easiest to get and sustain through management/organising skills, but a virtuoso technician, inspired designer, genius marketer or wizard salesman could also carry the business.
"Leadership" is a nebulous identifier that enables corporation CEO's to get huge, gigantic, colossal monetary bonuses for very little work actually accomplished. If a company ends up with good staff and good employees it somehow gets attributed to the CEO, even though they are the furthest removed from the process.
It doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t have the ability to influence people and get your good plan/product/idea executed
There are a lot of good comments but there is a bigger reason.
Marketing and negotiation are softer skills that many technical professionals don’t have or appreciate.
Therefore they don’t market themselves properly (make people value their contributions) nor negotiate the best package for themselves.
In my experience, technical people with those skills quickly rise past their non-technical peers.
Broader reach and generally more responsibility.
I'm definitely on the "expertise" track at work and have specifically avoided management because it simply doesn't mesh with my skillset or lifestyle. At my company at least, the people getting the calls late in the evening or over weekends are the managers. They are the ones that have to deal with scheduling conflicts, budget overruns, or fixing the big issues. They still take calls and deal with emails when they are on vacation.
While execs make a lot and probably don't have the big stress, the juice isn't worth the squeeze for middle management. They often don't make that much more and IME are the most stressed group at a company.
Because managers only understand leadership (if they understand anything at all). Expertise is for underlings.