Congratulations. Now Stop Doing What Got You Promoted.

There’s something a little backwards about the way we promote people into leadership.

You spend years becoming really good at something. Maybe you’re the finance person who can find the problem buried on page 47 of a spreadsheet, the engineer everyone calls when something isn’t working, or the attorney who spots the issue nobody else saw coming. Whatever your area of expertise, you become the person others rely on because you know your stuff and you’ve proven you can deliver.

People notice. You get bigger assignments, more responsibility, better titles. Eventually someone essentially says, “You’ve become really good at this. Congratulations. We’d now like you to stop doing so much of it and lead a bunch of other people who do it.”

What could possibly go wrong?

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only a little. I’ve worked with enough successful leaders to know that this transition can be a lot harder than we make it sound.

We tend to think about promotions as though they’re mostly additive. Take everything you already know, add some leadership skills, get a nicer title, and off you go. In reality, moving into leadership can require us to change our relationship with some of the very things that helped us get promoted in the first place.

That’s harder than it sounds because expertise eventually becomes part of our professional identity. If you’ve spent fifteen or twenty years being the person who can figure things out, there’s a lot of confidence and credibility wrapped up in that. There’s also the simple satisfaction of being really good at something. Most of us enjoy knowing what we’re doing.

Then you move into a bigger leadership role and find yourself sitting in a meeting while someone spends twenty minutes working through a problem you’re pretty sure you could solve in five.

Every instinct tells you to jump in.

So you do. You give them the answer, everyone moves on, and you’ve saved fifteen minutes. Not bad.

Except the next time that person faces a similar problem, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll look to you again. Save enough fifteen minute increments that way and you can eventually build yourself a job where everybody needs you for everything.

I see leaders wrestle with this all the time. Intellectually, they know their job has changed, but their instincts haven’t necessarily gotten the memo. For years, having the answer was rewarded. Stepping in was rewarded. Catching the mistake before it happened was rewarded. It would be strange if all of those instincts simply disappeared the day somebody changed your title.

Of course, leadership doesn’t require us to stop using our expertise. There are plenty of situations where stepping in is exactly what we should do. Sometimes the team genuinely needs our experience, and sometimes allowing someone to “learn from the experience” would be an extraordinarily expensive way to make a point.

The judgment comes in knowing the difference.

There are also times when the better move is to sit there a little longer and let someone struggle with the problem, ask a question when you already know the answer, or watch someone take an approach you would never have chosen and give them enough room to find out whether it works.

For someone who has spent a career being rewarded for knowing what to do, that can be surprisingly uncomfortable.

And it goes well beyond delegation. The deeper you move into leadership, the more time you spend dealing with situations where expertise alone isn’t going to save you.

People are complicated. A person who needs a push in one situation may need you to back off in another. A conversation that works beautifully with one employee could land terribly with someone else. You can make a thoughtful, perfectly reasonable decision and still discover that half the room sees it differently.

If there were a reliable formula for all of this, I suspect someone would have put it in a spreadsheet by now.

This is part of why I think the transition from expert to leader is so interesting. Your expertise still matters enormously, but you have to become much more thoughtful about when and how you use it. Sometimes the best contribution you can make is an answer. Other times, your answer gets in the way of somebody else developing one.

That requires a different kind of confidence. And as technology changes what expertise looks like, I think it becomes even more important.

AI can already help us access information, analyze problems, generate ideas, and perform work that once required considerably more time and specialized knowledge. As those capabilities improve, simply being the person in the room who knows the most becomes a less interesting definition of leadership.

What interests me much more is whether you can get the best thinking and capability out of the people around you. That requires knowing when your experience is exactly what the situation needs and when it might be causing you to dismiss another approach too quickly.

That’s part of what I explore in Inspired by LIFE. As the world changes, I believe our definition of what makes us valuable as leaders has to change with it.

The expertise and experience that got us here still matter. I certainly wouldn’t want the person who knows the least about finance running the finance organization in the name of enlightened leadership. But if we continue measuring our contribution primarily by how many answers we personally have, we’re going to miss a significant part of the job.

Maybe the better question isn’t always, “Can I solve this?”

It’s, “What does this situation need from me?”

I like that question because it forces us to think beyond what we’re capable of doing and consider what our role actually requires of us.

Which brings me back to the strange bargain we make when we promote people into leadership:

We spend years getting exceptionally good at something, and then discover that becoming a better leader may require us to prove it a little less often.