A lot of companies have built a career development system that makes perfect sense on paper and creates strange behavior in real life.

They want to reward and retain high performers, so they build the usual machinery: levels, titles, promotion cycles, compensation bands, management opportunities, bigger teams, larger scopes, and calibration committees.

None of that is irrational. Most of it is necessary at some stage.

The problem starts when one path becomes dramatically easier to see than the others.

In many companies, the clearest way to get more money, status, and power is to get promoted. Promotions earn you a larger surface area, seats in more important meetings, and closer proximity to executives.

It sends a loud and clear message to employees: upward movement is the definition of growth. Over time, employees learn to optimize for upward movement itself, whether or not it aligns with the kind of growth they actually want.

That lesson is especially powerful for High Slope Talent. They are good at reading the room and understanding the bigger system in which the room operates. They get curious and absorb which behaviors get rewarded, which careers get sponsored, which people get invited into bigger conversations, and which moves seem to create more optionality. Depending on what career season they are in, they either aim all their talents at promotion or start wondering whether they belong at the company at all.

The Three Types of Growth

At Waypoint Works, we think about three common career archetypes: Explorers, Climbers, and Deep Sea Divers.

These three archetypes are not life sentences. Think of them as career seasons. Most of us will resonate with one of these archetypes right now, but at another point in our career, we may have been another one entirely. All three archetypes care deeply about career growth. They simply define what growth looks like differently.

Explorers are on a quest to find the right opportunities for their growth. They enjoy experimentation, cross-functional projects that give them a window into another way of working, and they are endlessly curious. An Explorer would be excited to join a rotational program or work as a consultant, learning a totally new client every few months.

Climbers want to reach the apex of their career. They want the next title, larger scope, more responsibility, authority, visibility, and influence. They are motivated by leading bigger initiatives, making bigger decisions, and operating closer to the center of the business. They will do what it takes to earn a seat at bigger and bigger tables. And they often want it for pure reasons, too. They are intrigued by the ability to have a bigger impact, see their own growth, or support the dreams of their family.

Deep Sea Divers are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose within their chosen domain. They value deep expertise. They want to solve harder problems, deepen their craft, and make an impact on their industry or domain through groundbreaking work. You might find some Deep Sea Divers taking center stage at industry conferences or starting a Substack, while others may found companies, turning something they are passionate about into their life’s work.

None of these archetypes is better than the others. All three archetypes care about competitive pay and growth opportunities within their companies. Every healthy company needs all three.

The challenge is that most companies design career systems primarily for Climbers. Promotions, larger teams, broader ownership, management responsibility, and title progression are visible, measurable, and easy to reward. Over time, those signals become the default definition of success. Employees learn that growth means moving up, even when what they actually want is range or depth.

That is how companies end up pushing Explorers and Deep Sea Divers toward Climber goals.

How Promotion Becomes a Target, Not Recognition

The modern promotion system was designed to bring order and fairness to growing organizations, and in doing so, over-architected a reward system where promotion is the target, rather than growth being the target and promotion serving as recognition that the target was met.

Once people understand that promotion is the clearest path to money, recognition, status, influence, and job security, they start optimizing for the promotion process itself. They ask:

• What does the next level require?
• What work is most visible to the people in power?
• Should I become a people manager?

They start making career decisions based less on what growth means to them and more on what the system appears to reward. It’s a simple social-norming dynamic.

Organizational psychologists have studied this dynamic for decades. Victor Vroom's Expectancy Theory, as an example, shows that people pursue paths when they can see how effort leads to performance, performance leads to reward, and the reward is worth having.

In many companies, the Climber path has the strongest visible chain: take on more, become more visible, get promoted, earn more, gain more authority.

The Explorer path is harder to read. A lateral move might be great for the person and valuable for the business, but it can look like a detour. Titles and money don’t increase at the same rate. A rotation might build judgment, but it may not map cleanly to a compensation band. Internal mobility can be praised in theory and penalized in practice when every team is trying to protect its own headcount.

The Deep Sea Diver path is also harder to read. Expertise can be extremely valuable but is often less visible than headcount. A principal engineer who prevents a bad architecture decision or an operations leader who makes a messy system run cleanly may create enormous value without producing the kind of surface-area expansion companies are used to rewarding. Companies value these contributions, but they aren’t cleanly mapped to any sort of systemic reward system within the organization. Learning budgets only take you so far.

So the Climber path becomes the default because it is easier to explain.

Nothing Wrong With Climbing

Just because the Climber path is more tied to recognition does not make it a bad path. Companies need people who want to manage larger teams, sit in harder rooms, make less popular decisions, and carry more organizational load. A true Climber is not just chasing the title; they want to solve the problems that come with the climb.

The issue is that companies often make the Climber path the only credible path, and plenty of would-be Explorers and Deep Sea Divers see that as the best viable option, even when it isn’t. This is socially and systematically reinforced.

An Explorer who wants range may be told they need to “pick a lane” before they are taken seriously. A Deep Sea Diver who wants depth may be told the only way to keep growing is to manage people. A Climber who actually wants height may get promoted too quickly because the company uses promotion as retention rather than readiness.

That creates three different problems.

Explorers may be building cross-functional judgment. They move from customer support to customer success to product operations to product management, and the company struggles to uplevel them due to lack of depth in any one thing. Their resume may not look linear, but their pattern recognition may be exceptional. They may be the person who can see where the handoff breaks between sales and onboarding, why the product roadmap is missing a market signal, or how a team in one function has already solved a problem another team is just discovering. Yet, how do companies reward and recognize this impact when a promotion path simply isn’t the answer?

Deep Sea Divers start looking insufficiently ambitious when they may actually be pursuing mastery in a domain that matters deeply to them. They may not want to manage a team of ten. They may want to become the person everyone trusts on pricing architecture, enterprise onboarding, clinical quality, machine learning infrastructure, executive facilitation, or organizational design. They do not care what their title is, they only care that they have: interesting problems to solve, autonomy, expert-level compensation that matches their capabilities, and a path that does not treat bigger titles as proof of seriousness.

Climbers get hurt too. This happens more often than most companies admit. A High Slope Climber starts taking recruiter calls, and tells their manager. A promotion becomes the easiest retention tool available because the company wants to keep them

The problem is that retention and readiness solve two different questions. One asks, "How do we keep this person?" The other asks, "Are they prepared for the responsibilities of the next role?" When those questions get merged, organizations create misfit and call it growth.

One symptom of this dynamic is promotion into management without a clear skill and will for the role. Imagine a top-performing sales rep, respected by peers and at risk of leaving, so the company offers them a team and a promotion. Six months later, they are spending most of their week in one-on-ones, performance management, planning meetings, hiring loops, and cross-functional escalations. The work they were great at becomes a smaller part of the job. The company has not created growth; it has created misfit with a better title. Even if they wanted the climb, it wasn’t clear if they wanted strategic accounts as the path upward or to grow a team.

This is how you get managers who never truly wanted management but saw it as the fast track to "growth." Most managers have great intent but simply lack the skill or the will to really make management their craft.

What Better Design Looks Like

It’s important to note that we are not recommending any company demolish their promotion program. Promotions and titles matter for reinforcing behaviors, for clarity, and especially for the Climber archetype of growth.  

The goal is to stop making promotion the primary growth path and to architect a career development program that incorporates holistic and thoughtful reward systems.

Every company will approach this differently. The examples below are not a blueprint; they are examples of how organizations can create credible growth paths for all three archetypes.

Separate Compensation Growth From Title Changes

If every meaningful compensation increase requires a title change, employees will chase title changes. Companies need ways for people to earn more because their value has increased, even when their title has not changed.

For Climbers, this means compensation can grow as they test and then take on real increases in scope, not just when a new title is available.

For Explorers, this means lateral movement does not have to come with a financial penalty. A high-performing operator who moves into a strategic rotation, new market build, or product-facing role should not have to choose between range and earning power.

For Deep Sea Divers, this is non-negotiable. If expert paths are not economically credible, they are decorative. A principal engineer, senior researcher, executive coach, technical architect, or domain expert should be able to reach serious compensation levels without inheriting a team they do not want to manage.

Consider additional levers like spot bonuses and bonus programs, beyond base compensation. 

Let People Test Higher-Scope Work Before Promotion

A lot of companies promote people into jobs they have not actually experienced.

That is risky for the company and unfair to the person.

Employees should have ways to test the actual work of the next level before the promotion decision is made. Let them lead a cross-functional initiative. Let them manage a temporary project team. Let them own a planning cycle. Let them represent the function in a higher-stakes operating rhythm. Let them handle a real tradeoff with executive visibility and support.

Did they like the work, or did they only like the recognition attached to it? Did their judgment scale? Did they communicate well under ambiguity? Did they make other people better? Did they understand the cost of the seat they were asking for?

In simpler terms: do they want the job, or do they simply want the title and pay? Are they ready for the job, or do you want to do what it takes to retain them even if it’s bad for everyone?

This makes promotion a better signal. It also protects strong individual contributors from being moved into management as a retention tactic.

Give Permission for Creative Autonomy

Explorers want to shadow other teams; they want to experience a "day in the life" of someone else’s job. They want to learn about many things and work on cross-functional project teams.

Deep Sea Divers want space and permission to go deep on what they are most interested in.

While these two types are very different, the core need is the same: permission for creative autonomy—a chance to step outside the box of the typical Climber role, where you do the core job well enough to prove you're ready for the next one.

Depending on your company's stage and size, you can handle this in a number of ways. You can offer 10% time, job shadowing programs, cross-functional committees around culture or AI transformation, or—even at the team level—things like stretch assignments or hackathon days. The key is scaffolding intentional space for creative expression and deep curiosity.

Use Coaching and Leadership Training Across All Three Paths

At Waypoint Works, we believe coaching should not be reserved for executives only. Leadership development should not mean “training for the management track.”

All career archetypes benefit from the power of a thoughtful learning program or a one-to-one coaching relationship. They improve skills that are important in all types of roles and levels, from communication to relationship building to design thinking.

And while you can't always offer a promotion or an exciting new stretch project, you can send a clear and explicit signal that we care about you, we believe in you, and we're investing in your future with coaching or a training program. Training programs can be especially helpful for people on a specific track, like new managers or new executives. One-on-one coaching is better when the needs are more nuanced, and they might benefit from direct support.

Where We Go From Here

The best career systems do not pretend everyone wants the same thing. They make room for height, range, and depth. They give Climbers a real ladder, with honest tests before bigger jobs. They give Explorers room to roam, with structure and status attached to range. They give Deep Sea Divers serious expert paths, with compensation and influence that match the value of mastery.

This is better for employees, and it is also better for companies. It increases manager effectiveness, because you know the managers you have really want to be there, and they're ready for it. Sheryl Sandberg famously said, “Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.” In that quote, she was embracing the explorer alongside the climber. But really, I think careers are whatever you want them to be. The hope is that if you do it right, business goals align with personal growth goals and everyone wins.

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