From expert to leader: letting go and growing your team

There's a particular kind of promotion that punishes you with the work you used to enjoy. You were great at the thing — designing the thing, fixing the thing, writing the thing — and the reward for being great at it is that they took it away from you and gave you a team of people who do it instead.

If that's where you are, welcome to the move from expert to leader. It's harder than the promotion suggested it would be, and it's more important than your job description tends to make it.

Why expertise is the wrong tool for the leadership job

The instincts that made you excellent at the work are largely the wrong ones for leading other people doing it.

When you were the expert, doing the work yourself was efficient. Now, doing the work yourself starves the team of growth and signals that you don't trust them. When you were the expert, your judgement was the bottleneck — the right call usually waited for you. Now, your judgement going through six conversations is slower than letting six judgements be made well.

Leadership coaching uk-wide spends a lot of time on this transition. Not because it's exotic, but because it's universal — and the people going through it tend to feel uniquely incompetent at it.

Three things that help

Stop being the smartest person in the room. Not because you aren't — because making it visible costs you the leadership you're trying to build. The shift is from being the answer to being the conditions in which the team can find better answers than you would have.

Coach more than you correct. When someone brings you a problem, your first instinct will be to solve it. Try, instead, to ask one question that helps them solve it. The first ten times feel inefficient. By the hundredth time, your team is twice as capable as it was — and you're doing different work.

Decide what you're growing. Are you growing a team of executors, or a team of leaders? The two require different management. Most people accidentally optimise for the first and then complain that the second isn't appearing.

A useful frame

Coaching for senior leaders often comes back to one quiet sentence: whose growth are you here for? If the honest answer is mostly your own — a higher title, a bigger remit — that's worth knowing. If it's mostly the people you lead, the question is whether your week reflects that.

If you're navigating the move from expert to leader and want a thinking partner, book a free 45-minute call.