> As you move up the chain, it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under

> As you move up the chain, it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org. This will forever strike me as a post hoc rationalization for justifying salary increases when the truth is that the salary increase is just a natural outcome of being granted institutional authority. This is the most visible with the CEOs that fail being given absurd bonuses and then justifying that as necessary to attract top talent. The people that are value divisors are still given huge remunerations precisely because of the position, not because of their impact. To the exclusionary aspect of the idea, unless your employees are being micromanaged then a large part of their work is discretionary. If they are not being kept in the dark and are not working alone then a large part of their work is also collaborative. Putting these things together, your good employees will field requests from other teams, prioritize them on an ad hoc basis, connect dots and report opportunities amongst themselves: solving problems that influence many more customers than the direct ones they work with. Promoting them will move them out of the circle where they learn about these situations on the ground. Instead of multiplying your capabilities, you may end up dividing your people by removing a key communicator from the employee social network when you promote them. Potentially, everyone recognizes there is a problem, but the problem solver role is a vacuum. Worse if nobody is able to recognize there is a problem now that the person who was able to recognize it is faced with different challenges. Institutional authority is not isomorphic to collaborative potential (or any general notion of work multiplication). Personal authority, respect, cooperation, skill, insight, all kinds of things can make a person's individual contributions many times greater. All these things are independent of institutional authority and the actual use of institutional authority will almost always come off as a cheap form of insecurity: "Do it because I'm the boss." The truth is that it is easy to create a hierarchy and challenging to measure impact.