Conscious unbossing isn’t just a Gen Z thing. I’m a CMO who did it

“Conscious unbossing” got its name a couple of years ago, when a Robert Walters survey found most young professionals didn’t want to become middle managers.

Whether Gen Z actually acts on it is a fair question.

Plenty of them still take the manager job, and I get it, the raise for managing is 11% versus 7% for staying an individual contributor, per Glassdoor .

But the instinct is real.

I know because I had it too, and I’m a former CMO.

Senior people are stepping off the management track and going back to doing the work themselves.

From the outside it looks like a demotion, so people don’t advertise it.

In tech, where the data is best, it already has a name: SignalFire calls it the “Super IC,” and top individual contributors are starting to get paid like directors.

Most of the examples are engineers.

I came at it from marketing.

I spent years climbing, from product marketing all the way up to CMO, with a 65-person team at the peak.

Then I chose to give up the team and go back to doing the work myself.

Today I’m the founding marketer at AGI Inc., and I run the entire function myself, more of it than I ever could with a team behind me.

I write my own copy, build my own decks, and own every channel.