Most companies have their career ladder on the wrong side of the building.

They take promising juniors and turn them into task bots: matching the invoices for senior accountants and writing the contracts for senior lawyers. They're just running fragments of someone else's process. Then they act surprised when actual bots do it cheaper. This is deskilling dressed up as mentorship, and it creates jobs that deserve to disappear.

I never started as a junior anything. I didn't edit footnotes for senior writers or build slide decks for senior speakers. From day one, I wrote complete books and gave complete talks. Small audiences, small stages, but the entire arc of creation was mine. That's how you actually learn: by doing the whole job, not by inheriting the tedious bits someone else doesn't want to touch.

Smart companies flip the script. They don't turn specialists into generalists by promotion (a reliable way to destroy expertise). They turn low-impact generalists into high-impact generalists by expanding the canvas, not by handing them the brush of someone who's moved on to "strategy."

Give juniors ownership of the complete process from the start. Let them manage the entire customer journey, own the whole outcome, but for the smallest, low-risk clients. Give them complete but small problems. They'll scale faster than any carefully curated task list ever allowed.

Move the career ladder to the other side of the building.

— via the Solo Chief system