Almost every leader I work with was promoted because they were excellent at something specific — closing deals, running clinical cases, building product, managing accounts. Then the job changed underneath them. Suddenly the thing that made them valuable wasn’t their personal output anymore — it was their judgment, their ability to develop other people, and their comfort operating with less certainty than they used to have.
A quick check
Does this describe you right now?
- When something on your team goes wrong, is your first instinct to jump in and fix it yourself rather than coach the person through fixing it?
- Do you feel most confident in meetings where the topic is your original area of expertise, and noticeably less confident outside it?
- Do you find yourself missing the “doing” part of your old role, even though your current role isn’t supposed to involve much doing anymore?
- When you make a decision outside your original expertise, do you feel a flicker of “who am I to decide this”?
- Has anyone — a peer, a board member, a direct report — ever hinted that you’re still operating “one level down” from your actual title?
A normal transition that people get stuck in for years
If several of these hit close to home, you’re in a very normal, very common transition — and also one that a lot of talented people get stuck in for years, because nobody explicitly tells them the rules changed. Expertise got you into the room. It won’t be what keeps you effective in it.
The good news is that this is learnable
It’s not a personality overhaul — it’s a specific set of habits: trusting a team you didn’t build the same skills as, making calls with less complete information than you’re used to, and getting comfortable being evaluated on outcomes you influence rather than outcomes you directly produce. Leaders who name this shift explicitly move through it faster than leaders who just quietly feel uneasy and assume it will pass.
One clear next step
Name the shift out loud, to someone whose judgment you trust. Leaders who make it explicit move through it faster than leaders who wait for the discomfort to fade.
