OG Tuesday Issue #305

🧩 Stanford built a five-level scale for how much AI agency you actually want.

🤖 AI sped everyone up, and now managers are the bottleneck.

🗓️ Five planner techniques to reclaim the hours your week keeps eating.

👗 Seven summer trends a fashion editor swears will be everywhere this season.

Only 38% of employees actually want to become managers, which means the other 62% are navigating a question most companies still haven’t figured out how to answer: what does growth look like if managing people isn’t the goal?

The answer isn’t “wait and hope.” There’s a deliberate path forward, built on moves that already exist. You just have to know what they are.

Upskill Strategically

The fastest way to outgrow your current level is to become more valuable than your current role accounts for. That means identifying the skills commanding higher compensation in your field right now, and going after them with intention.

Certifications, technical depth, cross-functional fluency, AI literacy, whatever your industry is paying a premium for. Skills-based hiring has grown significantly in recent years, and companies increasingly use skill gaps to justify pay differences. Fill them on your own terms.

Advocate for Title Progression

Title follows scope, but not automatically. If your responsibilities have grown past your current title, that’s a conversation worth having.

Senior, Staff, Principal, Distinguished: these designations exist on most IC tracks and they matter, both for what you’re paid internally and how the market reads you externally.

Know your company’s leveling framework, identify exactly where you stand, and make the explicit case for the next level. Don’t wait for a performance cycle to bring it up.

Change Industries

The ceiling holding you back might be the industry itself. The same expertise that tops out at one level in one sector can command a much higher title and salary somewhere else.

A data analyst in retail might be a senior data strategist in health tech. A marketing manager at a nonprofit is often a director-level hire at a startup.

Lateral moves into faster-moving industries reset the clock on your progression in a way that staying put rarely does.

Teach and Train

Becoming the person who trains others is one of the most underrated moves in the non-management playbook.

Running internal workshops, mentoring junior teammates, building onboarding documentation, or leading a lunch-and-learn puts you in a visible leadership role without requiring a headcount. It also signals expertise to stakeholders who aren’t watching your daily output.

Organizations with strong internal knowledge-sharing cultures consistently outperform their peers; the people who lead that culture get noticed.

Consult

If you’ve built deep expertise in a specific domain, consulting is a natural next move. Start by taking on advisory work on the side while building a client base that reflects what your skills are actually worth on the open market.

The transition gives you options a single IC track rarely does, and you can move into it gradually before making a full switch.

Have the Conversation Explicitly

Don’t assume your manager knows you’re not interested in management, or that they know how to support IC growth if you are.

Ask directly: what does advancement look like on this track, what would it take to reach the next level, and who needs to be involved for that to happen?

If the answer is vague, or if every path to growth keeps circling back to “you’d need to take on a team”, that’s important information. Not necessarily a reason to leave, but a reason to negotiate, document, or recalibrate what you’re building toward.

The management track is the most visible path to growth, but deep expertise, influence, and income can all compound without a single direct report.

Your managers can’t be everywhere, but your employees are.

Harassment, bias, and inappropriate behavior rarely reach HR first. They happen in hallway conversations, off-site events, and the group chats that aren’t on the record — witnessed by bystanders who freeze not because they don’t care, but because they’ve never been trained to step in safely.

Traliant’s Bystander Intervention Training gives employees a concrete toolkit: the Four D’s (Direct, Distract, Delegate, and Delay), practiced through cinematic story-driven scenarios set in the real workplaces your team actually operates in. Chicago-compliant in a 1-hour format, with a 25-minute version for every other org.

When employees know how to act, intervention happens earlier — before behavior becomes a complaint, a claim, or a culture problem.

👉 Start your free course trial.

“My biggest challenge is juggling all the different hats I wear. HR, marketing, AP/AR… I can’t seem to block out my time to focus.” — Vanessa

You sit down to finally focus, and four minutes in there’s an HR question, an invoice that’s overdue, and a marketing email that should’ve gone out yesterday. When one person is running three departments, a clean block of focus was never going to just appear.

That’s the job you’re actually doing, Vanessa: a team’s worth of it, on one calendar that thinks you have a single role.

The sneaky culprit is the switching itself. Every time you swing from an HR question to an AP/AR deadline to a marketing email, your brain has to change gears, and gear changes cost you.

Bouncing between tasks can eat up to 40% of your productive time, which is wild when you sit with it. Nearly half the day, gone to the jumping.

So give each hat its own lane instead of asking your brain to be all three people at once. Marketing on Tuesday mornings. AP/AR in a Thursday block. HR questions saved for one window instead of answered the second they ping.

Share those expectations with your team clearly. They need to know what you need in order to support you well.

It’ll feel slower for about a week, and then you get whole afternoons where the work actually moves.

And that focus block? Put it on the calendar like a meeting with your most important client, because it is one. Guard it, notifications off, door closed if you’ve got a door. (We broke down how to claw time back from a packed week in our fewer-meetings guide, if the calendar’s the real battle.)

The stuff you keep sliding to “later” is almost always the work only you can do, so it deserves a real slot when your brain is freshest.

Then hand off anything that doesn’t need your actual brain, because a department of one lives or dies on this. The AP/AR reminders, the recurring HR forms, the social posts you batch anyway: template them, automate them, or pass them to a tool. That frees your judgment for the calls only you can make.

None of this means you’re behind. You’re covering a job built for a team and keeping the whole thing upright. So this week, pick one hat and protect ninety minutes for it. Just ninety. See what one clean block does.

That same client-site trip gets booked a dozen times a year and takes just as long every time: comparing flights, re-entering seat preferences, chasing down loyalty numbers, hunting for the gym-adjacent hotel. Somewhere between the fourth tab and the miles that didn’t credit right, an hour no one had is just gone.

Navan Edge remembers all of it. Say “same as last time” and the usual seat, hotel, and restaurant picks land in one chat, no search required.

Every trip stacks the traveler’s miles, hotel points, and credit card multipliers automatically. The loyalty programs built over years finally work together. Plus 5% back in Amazon gift cards on every hotel stay.

When plans change, a real person steps into the same chat. Nothing moves without approval, and nobody’s rebooking alone at midnight.

🧳 See how Navan Edge works.

🗓️ Scott Galloway and AI leaders share what you need to make your AI spend defensible. Free on 9/17.

📧 Girlboss is the digital playbook for ambitious women navigating the new world of work.

📚 Do not start Love, Mom at bedtime. The twists will keep you up.

👉 The AI video tool making it embarrassingly easy to finally show up on camera.

 Upcoming Events

• Fri 7/31 @ 8:30AM PT: Watch Me Work: Vibe Code a Portfolio in Real Time with Joanna (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Thu 8/6 @ 9AM PT: Harnessing Change Workshop with NextArrow
• Thu 8/13 @ 10AM PT: Your Voice, Not Theirs: The public speaking class for leaders (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)

* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.

 Work Wisdom of the Week:

“Don’t be afraid to speak up and say the hard thing. You aren’t the only one thinking it.” — Jacki R. (Director)

 Share your best work wisdom here.

 Browse our job board here.

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