Walk into some mid-sized Indian or Southeast Asian firms and ask how someone became a manager, and the story rarely changes. The best coder on the floor got promoted to team lead. The top salesperson became regional manager. Nobody asked whether either of them wanted to manage people, and nobody trained them to do it once they said yes.
Repeat that decision across organisations and the consequences can show up in engagement, retention and manager effectiveness. For many employers, the engagement problem may have less to do with another survey or wellness initiative and more to do with how careers are designed. A technically strong person isn’t necessarily unsuited to management; the problem is that technical excellence doesn’t automatically predict management capability or interest.
One Ladder and One Outcome
Many organisations across Asia still make management the default route to seniority. The 7th AIMA-KPMG MCDI India Report shows management scores dropped to 69.7%. This stagnation stems from a severe deficit in people leadership (66.4%), as companies persistently promote for technical capability and tactical results over emotional intelligence. A handful of large Indian IT services firms, including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro, have started building parallel technical career tracks for senior engineers who do not want to manage. According to reporting in Mint, this shift aims to stop losing their best technical staff to management roles they never actually wanted.
Cost of Only One Path
The problem isn’t uniquely Asian. Research from the UK’s Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of people entering management roles receive no formal training, and teams under untrained managers report sharply lower motivation and higher resignation. Asia’s version of the same failure runs deeper than a training gap. If the only way to earn more, gain status, and advance is to manage people, organisations eventually turn specialists into managers by default. Training a newly promoted manager addresses only part of the problem. A parallel career architecture addresses the reason the promotion happened in the first place.
Asian employers do not need another engagement dashboard. They need a second ladder. Large employers should consider building technical or specialist tracks that offer meaningful progression, recognition and compensation alongside management. The objective is simple: make management one route to seniority, not the only one. Reward technical excellence on its own terms, and many accidental managers may never need to become managers in the first place.”
