You probably don't need to force the _best_ engineers go into management to achieve this - you just need someone with the necessary background and experience -

You probably don't need to force the _best_ engineers go into management to achieve this - you just need someone with the necessary background and experience - and from that larger pool you can choose the ones that want to do management, and are more likely going to be good at it. The managers I deal with day-to-day were all once ICs in the same role, but I wouldn't put almost any of them in the same category as the strongest ICs we have in technical skill. And they mostly don't make bad technical decisions - because they mostly don't make any technical decisions - they defer to their strong ICs.