By Francis Nicholson – Expert in hiring Data, Insight and Strategy talent for the Age of AI

Editor’s Note

Last month we looked at the integrator: the strategist who creates value by connecting functions that weren’t designed to speak to each other. This month, a harder question. If that kind of work is increasingly where the value sits — lateral, relational, cross-functional — why does it so rarely appear on a job title, a pay band, or a performance review?

Because most organisations still reward the ladder. And most strategy careers are no longer shaped like one.

Market Signal

The data is starting to catch up with what many of us already sense.

Among professionals who have been in their roles for five or more years, 38% are no longer considering management positions as their next move. Even among current managers, 19% are actively seeking non-supervisory roles next. Progression without a title upgrade is becoming a deliberate choice, not a fallback.

McKinsey’s research on career mobility tells a sharper story still. The professionals with the most upwardly mobile trajectories — moving one, two, or three income brackets higher — were not the ones who stayed longest in a lane. They were the ones who made what McKinsey calls “bold moves”: roles that were adjacent but contained up to 40% genuinely new skills. Lateral stretch, not linear tenure, drove the biggest career gains.

Meanwhile, Deloitte finds that organisations adopting skills-based talent models — where range and adaptability are assessed alongside depth — are 63% more likely to achieve their desired business outcomes than those using traditional role-based frameworks. The logic is shifting. Most organisations just haven’t updated their reward systems to match.

Frontline

A strategy director at a professional services firm, reflecting on her last two career moves:

“Both times, I took what looked like a sideways step. Different sector, slightly smaller team. Both times, people asked me if I was sure. Both times, I came out the other side with a sharper point of view, a broader network, and frankly more interesting work. The ladder would have had me managing more people and attending more governance meetings.”

The pattern is consistent. The moves that look lateral from the outside often compound fastest on the inside.

Sharp Skill: Narrating the Non-Linear

The risk of a non-linear career is not that it limits your options. It is that others can’t read it.

Hiring managers, sponsors, and senior stakeholders are still pattern-matching against a ladder. A varied career looks like indecision to someone who has only ever seen one kind of progression. The strategist’s task is to make the arc legible — to give the range a narrative.

Three practical moves:

1. Name the thread, not the titles. The through-line of a non-linear career is rarely a job function. It is a kind of problem you solve, a lens you bring, a type of situation you thrive in. “I work at the intersection of data and commercial decision-making” is more compelling — and more accurate — than a list of lateral moves that require explanation.

2. Make range look intentional. Every move that felt exploratory at the time can be reframed as deliberate in retrospect. Not dishonestly — but accurately. The skills you built in each role were real. The question is whether you have articulated why they compound.

3. Publish your thinking, not just your work. In a lattice career, reputation travels ahead of you in ways a CV cannot. The strategists building durable visibility — as we covered in Edition 5 — are the ones whose thinking is legible before they enter a room. A newsletter. A point of view. A consistent voice on a specific tension. These are not personal branding exercises. They are how range becomes recognised as expertise.

Case in Point

McKinsey’s internal mobility research found that employees who took on rotational assignments — moving across functions, sectors, or problem types — were 20% more likely to be promoted than those who stayed within a single track. The moves that looked sideways were, in aggregate, the faster route up.

But here’s the friction: the same research shows that over 80% of role movements still involve people changing companies rather than moving internally. Most organisations structurally resist the lateral moves they claim to value. Which means that for many strategists, the non-linear career is largely self-managed — and self-narrated.

That is not a disadvantage. It is leverage, for those who know how to use it.

Closing Thought

The ladder was always a simplification. It assumed a stable hierarchy, a predictable market, and a single definition of seniority. None of those hold in the way they once did.

What’s replacing it isn’t chaos. It’s a lattice — and a lattice rewards different things: range, relationships, the ability to operate in unfamiliar terrain without losing your bearings.

The strategists who thrive in this environment are not the ones with the most impressive vertical climb. They are the ones who can make their journey make sense to someone hearing it for the first time.

Narrative is the new CV.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone who would find it sharp rather than safe — or forward it to a colleague who is navigating exactly this kind of career moment.

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