Early in my career, one of the people I counseled didn’t want my job.

I was a formal career counselor at a large consulting firm at the time. One of my counselees was a deep data conversion expert, the kind of person who makes sure years of records survive the move from an old system to a new one. She was very good at it.

She was also uneasy. The next step up was Manager, and she was worried about the project management load that came with it. She was thinking about switching to a different workforce inside the firm.

I was on the manager track myself, and it suited me. So, it would have been easy to assume she just needed some encouragement to grow into the path I was on.

I think every manager has a version of this temptation. Our own career fits us pretty well because we’ve spent years tailoring it. When someone asks for advice, we pull it out of our closet and hand it over. However, a career is a lot like a suit. Mine fits me because it was cut for me. Hand it to someone with different shoulders and it hangs wrong, no matter how good the fabric is.

So, instead of handing her my suit, I tried to do the work of a good counselor. I met with her regularly. I gathered feedback from three of her supervisors and wrote her annual contribution summary, so I had a real picture of how others saw her work. I was candid about one thing: I had seen few people thrive after leaving the consulting workforce, and I told her so. I also suggested she deepen her expertise and share it by teaching.

Then I learned something that changed the conversation. The firm had created a new specialist career path, one that allowed promotion based on deep skills without the selling track. I brought it straight back to her.

That’s the part I think about most. Advice is what I think. Information is what’s possible. She didn’t need my opinion about her career nearly as much as she needed to know about a door nobody had told her existed.

I also made sure her work was seen. I used the firm’s recognition program to call out her expert work, and I represented her in calibration, which is where promotion decisions get argued. Advocacy in that room matters more than any pep talk outside it.

She chose the specialist path. She was promoted to Manager. Within weeks, she took on a counselee of her own, which might be my favorite part of the story.

Around that time I wrote to our HR team, “I strongly believe in the role of Career Counselor, and I would enjoy another opportunity to guide someone’s career.” I meant it, and I still do. However, the lesson she taught me was more specific than “career counseling is good.”

A manager who makes copies of themselves ends up with a very boring team. The job is to help each person find the version of growth that fits them. Sometimes that means pointing someone toward a path you’d never choose for yourself. Sometimes it means going out and finding a path nobody has mentioned to them yet.

If you have a strong person on your team who seems stuck, try a different question in your next one-on-one. Instead of “Where do you want to be in five years?”, ask “What part of the next step do you dread?” Then go find out whether there’s a version of the next step without it.