"It is at this moment when individual contributors not familiar with the ways of managers realize that these folks have a heretofore unknown influence on their careers. They probably already suspected something was up because these people were sitting in meetings… all the time.

"When it becomes apparent these managers have special powers, a subset of individual contributors quickly become interested in management. "

The problem that I see with your approach to handling this -- ensuring adequate leadership opportunities within the IC path -- is that you haven't really addressed the problem that you name above. What's more, I'm not certain that you can.

It's certainly possible to ensure that everyone is kept conscious of the ways in which leadership is possible within the IC track. But those ways, by necessity, involve the power to make decisions over technical matters. They *don't* involve the power to make decisions over the subject you just correctly identified as what everyone wants power over: their own careers.

As far as I can tell, the whole point of having managers is that they're the folks who make the decisions about what happens to the human beings in the office. You can have IC leaders making all the decisions you want about the technical product details, but they still won't be able to decide who gets time off when they want it, or how they'll be treated when something goes wrong. Those are things managers decide -- that's what managers are there for in the first place. If you give ICs the right to decide those things for other ICs, you've effectively made them managers. And if you give each of them the right to decide for themselves, you've created an entirely flat system, with nobody who has the right to tell anyone else what to do.

Neither of these is incapable of working, in some situations. But they're not the situation you were talking about, I don't think. And yes, if the whole point of ICs reaching for management positions is that they want the opportunity to lead, you can probably give them what they want without taking them out of the IC track, by creating opportunities to lead within that track. Which is great, if that's the issue.

But a lot of the time, I don't think it *is* the issue. I think what people who look toward management slots are seeking isn't an opportunity to lead, but an opportunity to be safe from other folks having the right to jerk *their* lives and careers around.

That won't be solved by creating IC leadership paths. About the only way I know of to solve it is to make very, very certain you have only decent managers at your company -- people who won't abuse their power over other people's careers, or carelessly or stupidly mishandle them. And then to make certain that everyone in your company knows it.