Declining a promotion that a manager doesn’t feel is warranted does not conflict with providing a clear career path for team members. Promoting someone to staf

Declining a promotion that a manager doesn’t feel is warranted does not conflict with providing a clear career path for team members. Promoting someone to staff engineer who doesn’t meet the bar lowers the bar for a staff engineer at the company. Promoting based on a threat to leave communicates that one path forward is negotiation through counter-offers. Maybe that’s the culture some company are after, I don’t know. Management and leadership are distinct. There are people managers who don’t lead their teams and senior ICs who do.