Why Your Best People Struggle as New Leaders
“Strengths can become weaknesses when overused.”
I have opinions about sustainable performance that I hold for every team we work with and have been slow to apply to myself.
The version of this I keep running into is that I'm decent at my work, and I know it, and that knowledge quietly makes me the wrong person to hand things to other people. For a long stretch I told myself I was protecting quality and time, and also the people on my team. This newsletter is a great example of it. I am writing it right now at 6:50pm in the evening instead of handing it off to Rosie, who I know is quite capable. My team is not less capable than me. They are sometimes just less practiced, because I have made sure of it.
I have watched this happen to a lot of very good people and it usually follows the same shape. Someone is confident in their work. They catch what everyone else missed, their standard is visibly higher than the standard around them, and they stay late without being asked. So they get promoted, because that is what any sensible company does with a person like that. Four months later they are exhausted, their team is quieter than it used to be, and nobody can name what changed.
What changed is that the thing they were promoted for is now the thing running them. Work goes out, comes back with edits, goes out again, and eventually first drafts start arriving pre-hedged because everyone has learned there will be a second one. They are not doing anything wrong. They are doing the exact thing that got them promoted, with more people watching.
The Qualities That Stop Working
The qualities that make someone successful are very often the same qualities that become their biggest challenge as a leader.
The high achiever becomes the micromanager, because caring intensely about the standard and being unable to let anyone else set it are one instinct wearing different clothes. The empathetic leader avoids the difficult conversation, because what makes them good at reading discomfort in a room makes them least willing to create it. I have absolutely experienced that. The confident leader stops hearing feedback, because the certainty that let them make hard calls quickly is the same certainty that closes the door on the information that would have changed the call.
None of those arrived with the promotion. They are strengths that stopped being calibrated for the job.
Here is why it is so hard to see from the inside. Every one of those behaviors still feels like doing the job well. The micromanager experiences someone who cares about quality, the avoider experiences someone protecting a relationship, and the person dismissing feedback experiences someone being decisive. The internal experience is unchanged. What changed is where it lands.
Where It Lands
Once you are leading, how you work stops being a private matter. The team reads it constantly and mostly without discussing it. If a leader is unclear, people move slowly until things firm up. If a leader avoids conflict, people learn which subjects are not raised here. If a leader is reactive, work starts arriving pre-defended. None of that gets decided in a meeting. It gets absorbed.
Gallup's State of the American Manager analysis estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units (Gallup, 2015). That figure comes from Gallup's own analytics across millions of work units rather than from a published variance decomposition, so I hold it as a strong directional finding rather than a fixed constant. Even held loosely, it says something hard to argue with. Most of the difference between a team that is engaged and a team going through the motions traces back to the behavior of one person, and that person is the manager.
Which means the most important thing you will ever manage is not the project, or the roadmap, or the quarter. It is yourself.
To Be Sure
A quiet team is a cue. Plenty of things make a team go quiet that have nothing to do with the person leading it, and a leader who reads every soft signal as evidence against themselves has swapped one distortion for another. The point is to notice and stay curious rather than build a case.
Something to Try This Week
Twenty minutes, a piece of paper, no tool.
1) Name the quality that got you here, meaning what people would say if asked why you were promoted. Be specific and a little immodest about it, because nobody is grading this and it only works if the quality is real.
2) Write the overgrown version. High standards become rework. Empathy becomes avoidance. Decisiveness becomes deafness. What does yours look like when there is too much of it?
3) Find one place it ran last month. A moment you stepped in and did not need to, or a conversation you postponed. One instance is enough.
4) Ask one person. Someone whose read you trust, and not your most encouraging friend. Ask a narrow question rather than a broad one. "How am I doing" gets you nothing. Try "when I get stressed, what do you see me do?"
That last one is uncomfortable and it is where the value is.
The Groops Take
Richard Hackman, who spent a career studying what actually makes teams work, landed on a rough split he called 60-30-10. Around 60% of how well a team performs is set by the preparation done before the team ever meets, about 30% comes from how it is launched, and roughly 10% is left for the leader's real-time coaching once the work is underway (Hackman, 2011). He and Ruth Wageman offered it as a heuristic rather than a measured constant, and even held loosely it points somewhere useful.
That is the bet we make with every emerging leader we work with. Two things, both learnable. Understand what you personally bring into the room, since that is the instrument doing the influencing. Then learn to design the conditions a team needs before it starts, rather than improvising them once things are already tense.
Leadership growth begins with awareness, and awareness of yourself is the hardest kind to generate alone.
PS. The shift from doing the work to leading the people doing it is the whole subject of our six-week Emerging Leadership Groop, built for newer managers and high-potential individual contributors stepping into leadership for the first time. The next one starts Wednesday 30 September. Details are below if you are curious.
References
Gallup. (2015). State of the American manager: Analytics and advice for leaders. Gallup, Inc. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx
Hackman, J. R. (2011). Collaborative intelligence: Using teams to solve hard problems. Berrett-Koehler.
Kaiser, R. B., & Kaplan, R. E. (2013, April 4). Don't let your strengths become your weaknesses. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2013/04/dont-let-your-strengths-become