Hi peeps. I’m in an interesting position. I’m on a small marketing operations team of 5 within a very large corporation. My manager (who poached me from another adjacent role) is extremely toxic and has been a chronic workaholic who is essentially married to the company. That’s beside the point.
I earn a pretty respectable salary, and I deal with a very stressful and high-paced environment which is a lot to handle to begin with. Our workloads are unreasonable and unsustainable, and I struggle a lot to stay motivated. Respectfully, I am the most capable person on our team, and I am pretty much being groomed to take on a ton of new work in the near future.
I want to stay doing exactly what I am doing, continue to learn, get better, and honesty I don’t want to take the next step forward. I’ve seen so much turnover on our team and management, and I don’t want to burn myself out even more. I would pretty much be walking into a buzzsaw of zero work life balance, insane projects which I have no interest in, and I would probably throw my hands up and quit within 6 months. I’ve kind of understood over the past year that extra money is not worth being miserable.
My question is this: how do I professionally decline taking any steps forward into new roles without appearing unambitious and sabotaging myself? There are a few different levels of management that are just assuming i’m the next leader on our team, and I just want to keep doing what I’m doing. Not even really that lol thank you for the advice.