Modern business culture tries to motivate people for success. The plot arc of a successful career involves promotions, raises, increases in responsibility, and fancier job titles. The reality is that the path for advancement in most organizations involves ascending a leadership hierarchy.

Early in your career, you can get a few promotions for being an individual contributor. This is like advancing through the first few levels of a video game, where you don’t need to get that much better, but you need to persist to advance. Before too long, though, the path shifts. The technical ladder ends, and if you want to keep getting promoted, you have to take on some responsibility for managing and leading people.

Is that the right path for you? Here are a few signs that climbing the leadership ladder may not be a path to personal fulfillment:

Handling stress

One thing about taking on leadership roles is that you have more responsibility for ensuring that the organization runs well and that it’s pursuing an effective strategy. These more amorphous responsibilities mean that there is no clear set of hours when you can and cannot do your work. This contrasts with many roles that are client- or customer-facing where you can’t do your work when the customers or clients are not available.

As a result, the boundaries between work and nonwork hours begin to blur. In addition, the added responsibility can increase job stress. You need to be realistic about your own resilience skills and your ability to develop strategies to enable you to work when you’re at work and not work when you’re not at work.

I hold a high-level administrative role at my university. Theoretically, I could be worried about work issues all the time. I have had to develop a routine in which I exercise at the end of the workday to create a clear separation between work and the rest of my life, so that the stresses of my job do not infect my life and my sleep.

People who have higher levels of anxiety than I do and find it more difficult to disengage from the stressors at work will have a harder time succeeding in leadership roles over the long-term. They may have the skills to do the job, but an inability to manage stress will lead to burnout and potentially to health problems.

The joy of systems thinking

Leadership roles come with prestige and better pay, but as research on the hedonic treadmill makes clear, you will adapt to the additional pay and the title fairly quickly. After that, the joy you get from your work will come from the job itself, rather than from its perks.

As you advance in leadership, you will increasingly focus on system-level problems. That is, you have to think about the interaction of multiple forces in order to determine a good strategy for moving forward. Those forces might involve individuals, units, or groups within your organization, customers and clients, incentive systems, government regulation, and a variety of economic factors. The importance of all these elements is why there are rarely perfect solutions to problems. Instead, you find yourself managing the intended and unintended consequences of the courses of action you choose.

Some people (myself included) find that type of problem-solving an enjoyable challenge. If you are game to develop that skill and think it would be fun to address wicked problems daily, then the leadership track is a great path. If you prefer to focus on problems that are reasonably well-defined and have fewer moving parts, then leadership may not be the right choice.

What drives your satisfaction?

Even if you have skill for leadership, it still may not be the right choice. A chunk of your life satisfaction involves whether you feel like the work you have done has added up to something that fits your values and seems significant. There are lots of ways to make an important contribution. Some involve serving in leadership roles. Many, though, require you to be part of teams that implement solutions to problems you care about.

When you think back on your life achievements that are meaningful to you, what typically comes to mind? Do you derive satisfaction from organizing a team and having them complete a task? Or, do you relish specific contributions you made to a project—particular problems you solved, clients you helped, or issues you fixed?

If the contributions that bring you joy are ones that involve specific tasks, then leadership may not be the right role. Leadership takes you away from many potentially enjoyable daily tasks in favor of the organizational work that directs these efforts toward a strategy. Indeed, even if you do enjoy being in leadership roles, you may still miss some elements of other jobs you had in the past. It would be a shame, though, to hop on the leadership track if it requires giving up the aspects of your work that are most meaningful.