Most career growth systems are quietly failing us
This is something I've been wanting to get out of my head for a long time. It's about goals.
I’ve spent a lot of time leading teams where people are doing good work, hitting expectations, and still gradually disengaging. Nothing is obviously broken. Projects ship, deadlines get met, and performance reviews look fine. If you look at any single moment in time, the system appears to be working. But over longer periods, patterns start to show up that are harder to ignore.
The same people become bottlenecks because critical knowledge lives in their heads. Work slows down not because of lack of effort, but because too much depends on too few individuals. Strong engineers leave even when they’re considered successful, and when they do, the organization has to relearn things it already knew. These are not isolated issues. They are symptoms of a system that is optimized for short-term output rather than long-term health.
I don’t think this is a motivation problem. I think it’s a service design problem.
Most career growth systems are built around titles, promotions, and measurable performance against near-term goals centered around a singular leadership direction. That model is effective at driving immediate results, and it provides a sense of clarity that organizations need. But it also creates blind spots to team contributions and diversity. It does very little to encourage work that improves how future work gets done (building success systems), and it tends to undervalue contributions that don’t map cleanly to a role or a ladder.
At some point, I stopped trying to fix these issues with better processes and started asking a different question:
What if career and organizational growth wasn’t something we prescribe, but something we align?
Moving from ladders to alignment
The dominant model for growth is a ladder. You move forward by expanding your scope, taking on more responsibility, and demonstrating readiness for the next level. From an organizational perspective, this makes sense. It standardizes expectations and creates a shared definition of success.
The problem is that it assumes a single definition of success is sufficient for everyone and that that definition is best for the longterm health of the organization. In practice, people are motivated by very different things, and those differences tend to be treated as secondary. An engineer who cares deeply about system design will approach their work differently from someone who is motivated by accessibility or by reducing friction for other engineers. Another person may be energized by teaching and mentorship, while someone else focuses on reliability or long-term maintainability.
Most systems acknowledge these differences informally but don’t incorporate them structurally. They are treated as nice-to-have contributions rather than as central drivers of how the organization improves. Over time, that creates a disconnect. People either suppress what they care about in order to meet expectations (because money), or they pursue it in ways that feel disconnected from their actual work (doing something extra rather than being naturally included).
A value-based approach reframes those differences as assets. When people are supported in investing in the areas they care about, they don’t just complete assigned tasks. They improve systems, reduce future costs, and create forms of value that compound over time. Alignment, in this sense, is about connecting intrinsic motivation to real organizational needs so that effort builds on itself rather than resetting with each project. To be clear, this isn't extra work for anyone, it's included in capacity because it matters.
Separating the job from the career
One of the most practical changes I’ve made as a leader/human is explicitly separating the concept of a job from the concept of a career.
A job is bounded and immediate. It includes the responsibilities someone is accountable for today, along with the expectations required for the team to function. This layer needs to be stable. Without clear expectations and consistent delivery (and salary), everything else becomes fragile.
A career operates on a longer timeline. It reflects what someone truly cares about, what they are developing expertise in, and where they want to invest over time/energy. Careers are not linear, and they don’t map cleanly to roles or levels. They do, however, map cleanly to personal values and longterm happiness.
Most organizations blur these together, which creates a persistent tension. People are asked to treat success in their current role as the primary indicator of long-term growth, even when their interests are evolving in different directions. The result is predictable: individuals either focus entirely on their job and feel constrained, or they try to grow in ways that feel disconnected from their day-to-day work and eventually leave because of a misalignment.
Separating the two creates space without reducing accountability. People are still expected to meet the requirements of their role, but they are also given room to invest in areas that shape their longer-term contribution. Over time, that investment feeds back into the organization in ways that are difficult to replicate through assignment alone.
Applying this in practice
In practice, the shift shows up most clearly in how conversations change. Instead of focusing exclusively on structured goals or performance targets, we start asking questions that surface motivation and direction.
Questions like: what kind of work are you drawn to right now? What problems have been frustrating enough that you want to fix them? What do you find yourself thinking about even when it’s not assigned to you?
These questions expose consistent patterns in how each person approaches their work. Someone who cares about reducing friction will naturally gravitate toward improving tooling, documentation, or shared workflows. Someone motivated by accessibility will start identifying gaps and raising standards across projects. Someone who enjoys teaching will invest time in mentoring and making knowledge more accessible to others.
The important part is that this work is not treated as an extra activity. The goal is not to push people to pursue what they care about outside of work, but to help them integrate those motivations into their actual responsibilities. That requires some flexibility in how work is shaped, but it does not remove the expectation of delivery. People are still accountable for their role. The difference is that how they contribute begins to reflect what they care about, which tends to produce more durable outcomes.
Missing the long-term for the short-term
This approach rarely produces immediate, visible wins. If success is measured strictly through short-term output, it can even appear inefficient. Time spent in self-discovery, improving documentation, mentoring others, or refining internal systems does not immediately translate into faster delivery. It's actualy the opposite in that each person falls to a different area of the spectrum for value-based goals and it can seem like work is slowing down, but really we're just managing time effectively.
However, over time the effects become increasingly clear. Onboarding improves because knowledge is documented and shared. Fewer issues arise from inconsistent implementations. Teams become less dependent on specific individuals because expertise is distributed. Work becomes more predictable because the underlying systems are stronger. And we have a team filled with experts in specific areas in which they deeply care.
These changes are not dramatic in isolation, but they compound. The organization gains leverage, and future work becomes easier to execute. This is the category of value that most performance systems struggle to capture because it is indirect and delayed, even though it is critical to long-term sustainability.
Leadership in this environment
This model introduces a real tension for leaders, and it requires being deliberate about how that tension is managed.
As a manager, the responsibility for delivery, clarity, and accountability remains unchanged. That foundation is necessary for the system to function at all. Without it, any attempt at growth or exploration quickly becomes unstable.
At the same time, focusing exclusively on delivery means maintaining the current state rather than improving it. The coaching aspect of leadership is what enables long-term change. That involves creating space for reflection, asking better questions, and helping people connect what they care about to meaningful work.
It also requires restraint. When someone expresses what they care about, the instinct to immediately align it to current organizational priorities can undermine the entire process. Intrinsic motivation is fragile in that way. If it is redirected too aggressively, it stops being intrinsic.
The role of the leader is not to force alignment, but to find it. That often takes more time and requires more patience than traditional management approaches, but the outcomes tend to be more durable. It can sometimes make months or years to even get team members to a place where they're ready to address value-based goal systems; not everyone has the stomach for that level of personal investment.
Where the system breaks down
There are a few consistent ways this approach fails. One is over-formalization, where leaders try to turn it into another structured goal-setting system. This removes the intrinsic component and replaces it with compliance, which defeats the purpose.
Another is neglecting baseline performance expectations. When accountability slips, the model loses credibility and creates understandable skepticism. The balance between exploration and delivery is not optional; it is the condition that makes the system viable.
A third failure point is pushing people to define what they care about before they are ready. This often results in vague or performative answers that don’t hold up over time. Not everyone has immediate clarity, and the system needs to allow for that.
These failure points are not surprising. The approach depends on factors that are difficult to standardize, including trust, timing, and individual readiness. It works best when introduced gradually and reinforced through consistent, low-pressure conversations rather than formal rollout.
What I pay attention to now
As a result of this shift, I’ve changed how I think about growth and performance. Output still matters, but it is no longer the only signal.
I pay more attention to whether people are investing in areas they genuinely care about, whether knowledge is becoming more distributed, and whether team members are helping each other without being directed to do so. I also look at whether the team is becoming less fragile over time, particularly in how it handles change and turnover.
These are not soft indicators. They are early signals of whether the organization is becoming more resilient and capable. They tend to show up before traditional metrics reflect any change, which makes them useful for understanding direction rather than just outcomes.
What's the point of all this?
This approach is not about making work feel better in a superficial sense. It is about designing organizations that improve as they operate.
When people are connected to what they are doing, they invest in systems, not just tasks. They share knowledge, reduce friction, and build capabilities that outlast individual projects. Those contributions are difficult to mandate, but they can be enabled through thoughtful design.
When that happens, growth becomes less about managing individuals through predefined paths and more about creating an environment where meaningful contribution emerges naturally and is reflective of the diversity within a team. Over time, the organization becomes more adaptive, more resilient, and less dependent on any single person to function.
That is the outcome most growth systems are trying to achieve, even if they are not designed in a way that makes it likely.