[thwarted]

One thing you definitely don't want to do is take a team away from people who consider themselves to be engineers who happen to be in a people manager role (and have been for a long time and are considered by their team and the wider engineering org to be successful at it). And if you want to do this, you have to make sure the person, and their team, is on board with making that change.

This can be especially problematic if you don't have a culture of the organization being driven by engineering; where becoming a "manager" affords more success (making decisions, getting things done) purely because you're a manager now (because of the political aspects). Removing the people management leadership position then can feel like a demotion.