If you manage or work alongside senior individual contributors, you've probably seen this: someone excellent at what they do, years into their craft, respected by their peers… and yet the organisation doesn't quite see them as a leader.
The frustration, if you've sat with it long enough, isn't really about recognition. It's structural. Mastery of a craft takes you to a certain point in most corporate hierarchies, and after that point, the path forward is almost always the same: manage people. Take on a team. Accept that the job is now different. And if that's genuinely what someone wants, the path is reasonably clear.
But if it isn't, if the person wants to go deeper rather than broader, if what they love is the work itself, the structure has very little left to offer. They can keep getting better, become genuinely exceptional, and the organisation will still struggle to see that as leadership, because leadership in most org charts is defined by who reports to you.
This puts middle leaders and those of us who design how teams operate in an uncomfortable position. We can see the gap. We often can't close it unilaterally because we don't control the promotion criteria, the levelling frameworks, or what the organisation above us decides counts as a leadership track.
But doing nothing, or waiting for the structure to evolve on its own, tends to mean the people most invested in their craft quietly run out of road.
What you can actually design for
If you're in a position to create conditions for ICs, i.e., as a manager, a DesignOps practitioner, or anyone designing how a team operates, I don't think you can solve the structural problem. Whether the organisation will eventually recognise and reward IC leadership without a title is not something you can engineer. That depends on culture, on the people above you, on timing, on a dozen things you don't fully control.
What you can create is the opportunity to try on the leadership hat. Concretely: real exposure to senior stakeholders, with real accountability for how that goes. Not just a curated presentation in a meeting, but an ongoing relationship where the person has to navigate something genuinely difficult - competing expectations, unclear mandates, decisions where there's no obviously right answer. The kind of situation where you develop an instinct for leadership precisely because the cost of getting it wrong is real.
The goal isn't necessarily to build a case for promotion inside this organisation (though that might happen). It's to let the person accumulate genuine experience they can carry anywhere. Whether they eventually step into a formal leadership role here or somewhere else, they'll have had a taste of what it actually asks of them: the discomfort of accountability without full authority, the specific skill of earning trust rather than inheriting it, the judgement that only comes from having made a real call and lived with the outcome.
The honest limits
There are two things worth being clear-eyed about.
The first is that creating this kind of opportunity requires you to let someone take on real exposure… which means they can also really struggle, or fail, or find that the leadership hat doesn't fit the way they expected. A safe environment for this is one where you can debrief honestly and where failure isn't career-ending. It isn't one where the stakes are artificially low, because artificially low stakes produce artificial experience.
The second is that you can give someone all the right conditions and still have the organisation not catch up. They may develop genuinely strong leadership capability, build real credibility with stakeholders, and find that the structure still doesn't have anywhere to put them. That's happens. But the work you've done with them isn't wasted. The skills are portable, the relationships are real, but it would be dishonest to promise that doing this well inside one organisation guarantees recognition within it.
The thing you can offer is the opportunity and a safe enough environment to use it. What happens next is, in part, up to them.