The Promotion That Breaks You
#The title change is on your profile. The email went out. You got the promotion. It’s the thing you worked for, the step up, the recognition that you are the best at what you do. It should feel like a win.
So why does it feel like you’re drowning?
You find yourself late at night, rewriting a junior team member’s code or redoing their slide deck. It’s just faster to do it yourself. It feels productive. It feels competent. In the quiet of the office, you can hear the hum of the servers and the frantic typing of your own keyboard, and for a moment, you feel like yourself again. The person who gets things done.
But that feeling is a lie. That feeling of competence is the anchor dragging you under. You’re doing your old job, the one you were great at, because you are terrified of the new one. And you’re right to be terrified. The rules changed the moment you accepted the new title, and nobody gave you the new rulebook.
The Thing That Got You Here
#The central myth of career progression is that you should keep doing the thing that earned you the promotion. You were the best salesperson, so now you lead the sales team. You were the fastest coder, so now you run the engineering group. You were the visionary founder, so now you’re the CEO.
The logic seems sound. But it’s a trap.
The very skills that made you an exceptional individual contributor are often the wrong skills for leading a team. Your value is no longer your personal output. Your value is now the output of your team. Your job is no longer to be the best player on the field. Your job is to be the coach.
Clinging to the identity of being the “best” is how you fail your team. You become the bottleneck. You rob them of the chance to learn, to struggle, and to eventually succeed on their own. Every time you jump in to “fix” things, you are sending a clear message: “I don’t trust you to do this.”
Your job changed. Your instincts did not. That is the fundamental conflict of every leadership transition.
It’s a Capability Reset, Not a Reward
#Here is the reframe that can save you: a promotion is not a reward. It is a deliberate capability reset.
You are supposed to be bad at your new job, at least for a while. That feeling of incompetence, of being an imposter, is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that you are finally starting to do the new work.
The real job is to let go. You have to consciously and sometimes painfully give up the source of your old confidence. You have to trade a tangible, immediate sense of accomplishment for something much fuzzier, with a much longer feedback loop.
This isn’t just about learning new skills like running 1-on-1s or managing a budget. It’s about grieving a part of your professional identity. The person who could single-handedly solve the hard problem is gone. A new person, who creates an environment where hard problems get solved by others, has to be built in their place. That construction process is slow and unsteady.
I Have The Scars From This
#
This isn’t a theoretical model. I’ve lived it, multiple times. Each transition was harder than the last, not because the work was harder, but because the identity I had to shed was more ingrained.
As a PhD student, my entire value was my data and my analysis. My name was on the paper. My competence was mine alone.
Then I co-founded RoadBotics. Suddenly, my job wasn’t to be the best machine learning engineer. My job was to convince people who were better than me to join us. The first time I hired someone who could run circles around me technically, it was both terrifying and liberating. I had to let go of being the smartest person in the room on my own subject.
Then I became CEO. The technical work was a distant memory. My days were spent on spreadsheets, investor decks, and holding the team steady when everything felt like it was on fire. I had to let go of building the product and learn to build the company that builds the product. The skills were not transferable. I had to start from zero.
After we sold the company to Michelin, I became a CTO inside a massive global organization. Another reset. Another new set of rules, another identity to let go of. Each time, the hardest part was giving up the thing that had made me feel successful at the previous stage.
The Work of Stepping Up
#So how do you navigate this? It isn’t magic. It’s deliberate, unglamorous work.
Name what you’re leaving behind. Take out a piece of paper. Write down the activities that used to define your competence. “I am no longer the person who closes the deal.” “I am no longer the person who writes the code.” Say it out loud. It makes the transition a conscious choice, not a passive drift.
Find your new unit of value. Your old metric was easy: deals closed, features shipped. Your new metric is harder to measure. It might be a well-run team meeting that produces clarity. It might be a difficult conversation that gets a project unstuck. It might be seeing a person you hired a year ago get promoted. You have to learn to find satisfaction in these indirect, lagging indicators of success.
Get a peer who has made the jump. This is the most important part. You need someone who isn’t your boss and isn’t your direct report. You need someone who is about one year ahead of you on the same path. They are the only person who will truly understand the specific vertigo you’re feeling. They can listen and just say, “Yeah, that part is the worst. It gets a little better.” The loneliness of a leadership transition is profound. It’s much easier to survive it with a guide.
This transition is never a clean, single event. It is a messy, ongoing process. You will backslide. You will find yourself wanting to grab the keyboard and just fix it yourself.
The goal isn’t to never make that mistake. The goal is to notice when you’re doing it, and the next day, try a little harder to do the new job. That’s it. That’s the work.
If this territory feels familiar, I write about leading through change and the messy parts of building things often. You can follow the essays here or find the day-to-day thinking on LinkedIn.