A good person wants to grow and the only script anyone has is "promote or they leave"

The bind is real, and you have more to give than a promotion. The only script most of us got for growth is a promotion, so when someone good says "I want more," the manager brain jumps to promote, or lose them.

But that's the trap. A promotion often moves a person off work they're great at, onto work they're not. A strong builder becomes a stretched manager: the Peter Principle. It can cost you twice: someone unhappy in the new seat, and the person you meant to keep leaving in the end.

What your person really wants is rarely the title. It's what growth brings: harder problems, wider scope, real mastery, more trust. Each has a lateral form, and their results show where it lives. You'll need two sections of their Career Discovery report, and their real results, not your read of them.

Open The Five Types of Work first. It names their primary type and natural complement, the work that energizes them:

• Analytical: data, logic, getting to the right answer.
• Creative: generating ideas, designing, making something new.
• Integrative: connecting people and pieces, seeing the whole.
• Influential: persuading, rallying people to a direction.
• Operational: running the system, executing, keeping it on track.

Now open Aligned Work Areas: the nine job areas their wiring fits. This is your menu of lateral growth, new scope that still sits on their grain.

Now build the map. One page, fifteen minutes.

1. Write their primary and complement work type at the top. Then circle the two or three Aligned Work Areas that feel most alive and least used today.

2. In one column, list new scope to add: a project, decision, or area to own that sits in those aligned areas and leans on a work type they get too little of.

3. In a second column, list what to hand off. New scope with no room is just a bigger pile. Name one task to move off their plate, ideally one that bores or drains them.

4. Leave the third column blank. That one is theirs to fill in the conversation.

Then have the conversation, and let them lead it. You're not handing over a finished plan. You're showing a map and asking which way pulls.

You walk away holding a one-page growth plan in their own words: the scope they chose, the task you'll lift off them, and a first step with a date on it. No new title, and a good person stays and grows.