There’s a particular kind of disorientation that hits high performers when they step into bigger leadership roles, and almost nobody prepares them for it. It’s not imposter syndrome exactly — it’s more precise than that. It’s the discovery that the skills responsible for their entire track record of success suddenly matter less, and a different set of skills — ones they’ve never been formally taught — matter more.
The athlete who becomes a coach
Think of it like being a brilliant individual athlete who gets asked to become a coach. The instincts, the mechanics, the years of muscle memory — none of it transfers directly. Coaching requires reading other people, building systems, and getting results through others rather than through personal execution. Some of the best athletes make terrible coaches precisely because they can’t stop trying to do it themselves.
The same pattern, in every expert profession
The same pattern shows up constantly in business, medicine, law, and finance. The person who could out-negotiate anyone in the room gets promoted to lead a team of negotiators — and instinctively keeps taking the important calls personally, because delegating them feels like a risk they’re not sure they need to take. The clinician who has the best outcomes in the practice becomes the managing partner — and keeps quietly reviewing everyone else’s cases, because trusting the team’s judgment feels less certain than trusting their own.
Not a character flaw
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a rational response to years of being rewarded for exactly the behavior that’s now holding them back. The discomfort of the transition is the actual signal that something needs to change — not a sign that you’re failing at the new role.
Leaders who work through this deliberately — rather than white-knuckling it and hoping the discomfort fades — tend to come out the other side with a genuinely different, more sustainable way of operating. Leaders who don’t tend to either burn out trying to do both jobs at once, or plateau at exactly the level where the old skills stopped being enough.
One clear next step
Identify one thing you are still doing because you were once the best person at it, and decide deliberately whether that is still the right use of your judgment.
