Leadership Transitions

The title change is on your profile. The email went out. You got the promotion, the thing you worked for, the recognition that you’re 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.

That feeling is a lie. That sense of competence is the anchor dragging you under. You’re doing your old job, the one you were great at, because you’re terrified of the new one. And you’re right to be terrified. The rules changed the moment you accepted the title, and nobody gave you the new rulebook.

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 engineering. You were the visionary founder, so now you’re the CEO. The logic seems sound. It’s a trap.

The skills that made you an exceptional individual contributor are usually the wrong skills for leading a team. Your value is no longer your personal output. It’s the output of your team. Your job is no longer to be the best player on the field, it’s to be the coach.

Clinging to the identity of being the best is how you fail your team. You become the bottleneck. You rob people of the chance to learn, to struggle, and to eventually succeed on their own. Every time you jump in to fix things, you send a clear message: I don’t trust you to do this.

Your job changed. Your instincts did not. That’s the fundamental conflict of every leadership transition.

Here’s the reframe that can save you: a promotion is not a reward. It’s a deliberate capability reset.

You’re supposed to be bad at the new job, at least for a while. That feeling of incompetence, of being an imposter, is not a sign you’re failing. It’s a sign you’re finally starting to do the new work.

The real job is to let go. You have to consciously, sometimes painfully, give up the source of your old confidence and trade a tangible, immediate sense of accomplishment for something fuzzier with a much longer feedback loop. This isn’t just about learning to run one-on-ones or manage a budget. It’s about grieving a part of your professional identity. The person who could single-handedly solve the hard problem is gone, and a new person, who builds an environment where hard problems get solved by others, has to be built in their place. That construction is slow and unsteady.

I’ve lived this, several times, and 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, and suddenly my job wasn’t to be the best machine learning engineer, it was to convince people better than me to join. The first time I hired someone who could run circles around me technically, it was terrifying and liberating at once. 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 spent on spreadsheets, investor decks, and holding the team steady when everything felt 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 started from zero. After we sold to Michelin and I became a CTO inside a massive global organization, it reset again. Each time, the hardest part was giving up the thing that had made me feel successful at the stage before.

So how do you navigate it? It isn’t magic. It’s deliberate, unglamorous work.

• Name what you’re leaving behind. 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. The new one is harder to measure. A team meeting that produces real clarity. A difficult conversation that gets a project unstuck. Someone you hired a year ago getting promoted. You have to learn to find satisfaction in these lagging, indirect signals.
• Get a peer who has made the jump. The most important one. Not your boss, not your report. Someone about a year ahead of you on the same path, the only person who will understand the specific vertigo you’re feeling and can say “yeah, that part is the worst, it gets a little better.” The loneliness of a transition is profound. It’s much easier to survive with a guide.

This is never a clean, single event. It’s messy and ongoing. You’ll backslide. You’ll catch yourself wanting to grab the keyboard and just fix it. The goal isn’t to never make that mistake. It’s to notice when you’re doing it, and the next day try a little harder to do the new job. That’s the work.

If this territory feels familiar, I write about leading through change and the messy parts of building things most days on LinkedIn. The essays below go deeper.

• The Promotion That Changes Your Friendships (And How to Save Them)
• The New Manager’s Guide to Leading a Team Through Constant Change
• Authority, Not Tasks: The Real Handoff to Your First Manager
• The Company That Grew Out of My Head
• Leading Through Change