There’s a new word for those who are apprehensive or outright uninterested in career advancement.
Included in a new book of 100 Future Words, “ladderdodging” is defined as “declining or choosing not to seek out a promotion or high-level role in order to avoid the added pressure, risk, and loneliness that often comes with management positions.” And it coincides with a real trend unfolding in the workplace.
Declining a promotion was once almost unheard of, but recent studies suggest it’s now become the norm—especially among younger workers.
A July survey by emotional insight platform Hint App found that 58% of workers would reject a promotion if it required them to be available after hours. Similarly, a 2024 survey by recruitment firm Robert Walters found that 57% of Gen Z professionals have no interest in middle management, and Deloitte’s two most recent annual “Gen Z and Millennial” surveys both found that only 6% see leadership as a primary career goal.
“Ladderdodging is essentially people at work looking at the offer of a promotion and seeing the additional stress and additional responsibilities that come with it, and saying, ‘You know what? I’m good,’” explains Rohit Bhargava, coauthor of Future Words: A Non-Obvious Glossary of Terms That Don’t Exist (but Soon Will) and founder of the leadership training firm The Non-Obvious Company.
Managing “not just work” but also “all of the human dynamics” of the people working for them “is not something that everyone’s ready to do,” he explains.
Bhargava says he and coauthor Henry Coutinho-Mason came up with each of the 100 words based on emerging research and anecdotal evidence from working with business leaders. The goal of the book, according to Bhargava, is to spark conversation while offering new language to describe existing or emerging trends.
Putting a label on the feeling that some workers get when offered a promotion that seems daunting or undesirable, however, could also shape their behaviors, Bhargava says.
“People might look at that and use it as permission, like, ‘I’m on trend—other people are doing this, too,’” he adds. “The smart organizations will be the ones who look at a word like this as an indication of a trend, and ask the next question: ‘Why are they dodging the promotion?’”
Why are workers ladderdodging?
The reasons for rejecting a promotion are many, from the added emotional burden of managing interpersonal conflicts to the practical challenges of managing a more demanding work schedule.
But over the years, researchers have found deeper psychological reasons for rejecting advancement. And it will take a lot more than a bump in pay to help them get over those mental roadblocks.
According to research conducted by Sue Ashford, a professor of management and organization at the University of Michigan, there are three primary perceived risks that prevent workers from signing up for leadership opportunities: instrumental risk, image risk, and interpersonal risk.
Instrumental risk
Ashford explains that those who step into a leadership role immediately become responsible for the success—or failure—of the group.
“Instrumental risk is being worried about the team not performing,” Ashford explains. “If you step up and lead, and things go badly, you get blamed.”
Ashford says that before deciding whether to put themselves forward, most workers will consider their confidence in the group’s abilities, and whether they will be given the space to learn from failure without professional repercussions.
“The research on psychological safety would suggest the context makes a big difference,” she says. “In a culture where you have to prove yourself all the time, the risk is way higher than in a culture where you can try stuff. And if it doesn’t work out, that’s okay—you’ll get better.”
Image risk
With 82% of managers receiving no formal leadership training, many are understandably apprehensive about moving from a job where they have proven their abilities to one that could highlight their shortcomings.
Ashford notes that managers often think to themselves: “If I don’t really know exactly how to lead, I’m likely to do some things wrong and look stupid. We’re a little uncertain whether we can do it, and we’re really afraid we’re just going to sound corny or cheesy.”
Even with the proper training, she says leadership skills can take a long time to develop and, in the meantime, people need to get comfortable with the discomfort of faking it.
Interpersonal risk
Research has found that workplace friendships are getting harder to develop and maintain, especially as we get older. Going from colleague to superior can risk those relationships.
“If I step up and lead, and let’s say somebody else wanted to lead as well, we’re going to have interpersonal strife,” Ashford says. “Or if I step up and lead, I will lose all my friends—all the people that I typically hang out with, the network that I’ve developed—because I will be different.”
The allure of greater authority, prestige, and compensation may have been enough to overcome those risks in the past. But social connections are coming at a greater premium in the digital age.
“We’re really hungry for social relationships right now, and I think people are much more aware of the effects of status on social dynamics in the workplace than they used to be,” says Tessa West, an author and professor of psychology at New York University.
“People are not in third spaces as much, so they’re not meeting people organically. Adult social relationships feel really fragile right now, so if we’ve made good ones, stepping into a power role could just completely shatter all of those,” she adds.
Mental Health Preservation
Just as adults are becoming more aware of the fragility of their social bonds, so too are they becoming more aware of the fragility of their mental health.
“There is a very strong narrative that the pay and resources are often not worth the sacrifices that you make to climb up at work,” West says. “We have much more knowledge about what stress does to us, what relationship sacrifices do—it’s just in the zeitgeist.”
She explains that most workers have seen their own managers struggling to keep up with the heightened demands that come with their position and have determined that the added stress is not worth the added pay.
Certainty Bias
Stepping into a new role often requires stepping out of our comfort zone, and those who have found a position that suits their interests, skills, and lifestyle are less willing to make that leap.
“Living in this crazy, uncertain world, if we get certainty from our current job—we figured out how to do it, we know exactly what it takes to accomplish it, what will happen if we don’t—why would you give up that certainty?” West says. “The one thing that [young people] are certain of is that everyone they know in management is totally miserable.”
Norm Erosion
Further fuelling the ladderdodging trend is a general feeling that managerial authority has been eroded in recent years due to flattening workplace structures, technological advancement, and a crisis of workplace trust.
If managers of previous generations took a “my way or the highway” approach, today’s leaders are more restricted to more of a “please consider my way” stance, West argues.
“There’s a real norm erosion in the workplace right now, having to do with accountability and engagement, and we’re seeing that senior decision-makers are creatively disengaged from holding people accountable when bad things happen,” she says. “Nobody wants to crack down on those nasty employees, because they know it’s just going to be costly and annoying.”
West explains that in a world where the most expedient way to crack down on misbehavior is a lengthy performance improvement plan that does little to solve immediate workplace challenges, managers are feeling helpless and disengaging from the job.
For all of these reasons and more, workers are finding less of a reason to turn away from a job they know, the social bonds they’ve developed, the work-life balance they’ve achieved, and the self-image they’ve created to try their hand at leadership.
As a result, many are declining promotions—so much so, that it’s inspired new terminology.
