From Doer to Leader: Redefining Competence in Your New Role

I want to start with a sentence that I hear ever so often from managers that I doubt they ever say out loud.

They will say, and sometimes with a bit of shame, that their direct report would honestly be better at their job than they are. If you ever had a version of that thought, I want to spend this episode on where it comes from, because it is not the thing you think it is, and the usual response to it, which is someone telling you, “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re great at your job and do this way better than your employee,” does typically not help.

My name is Ramona Shaw. I’m an executive coach and run the leadership development company Archova, and this is the Manager Track Podcast.

Now, here is what actually goes on when this statement is made, that you have someone on your team who knows more and who actually might be better at your job. For years, maybe your whole career, you built your sense of being good at your job on a very specific definition of competence.

Competence meant I know the most, I do it best. I’m the one people come to when the work is hard. In whatever job you have, you got really good, and being good felt like mastery and also felt like self-sufficiency. That is great, and it has been a success strategy that worked for a long time.

That mindset of developing competence in your field of expertise, making sure people know about your competence, and then you actually got promoted. Well done. This all played out. But very likely without anyone telling you, the definition of competence changed right then when you got promoted.

So right after all of this kind of worked out, the whole game changed. The new role, this being in a manager position, does not reward you for personally doing the work the best. It does not reward your competence nearly as much as you likely believe it does. It rewards you for delegating, developing people, and thinking at the level of the whole project or even the business instead of the individual tasks.

So the scoreboard got swapped, and in most cases, nobody told you the new rules. So now, if you’re standing in this new role, still measuring yourself with the old ruler, the old scoreboard, of course you come up short, and of course your direct reports start to look better than you. Especially if they are succeeding in a project and you now want to give them credit because you generally think that’s the right thing to do.

But suddenly, as you see them be so successful and they’re taking credit, while we on the leadership front all know that, yes, that person got credit, but you probably as the manager did a whole bunch of work in the background that no one ever talks about, no one ever sees, and you’re not getting credit for. So that is, by the way, knowledge people have in the leadership realm, that they all know this is how the game is played.

But if you start to feel in those moments, “Oh man, they’re getting all the credit. No one’s looking at what I did.” They’re now being sort of the hero in the story as the most competent person, no longer you. So if your direct report starts to look better than you, you’re actually comparing their execution, the thing that they do all day, to your leadership, the thing you just started doing and also the thing that’s a very different job.

So saying your report would be better at your job is categorically an error, like the apple-orange comparison. They would be better at the job you used to have, but that might be a bit of a hit to your ego, and that is okay. It is actually a success for you to have someone on your team who is even better than you used to be, because that makes your team stronger. And also, the whole thing about the ego is, hold on a second, you have to manage your ego here because that job is no longer your job. You have a different job now.

So this is also why the reassurance does not work in itself. I want to be honest about that. When someone says, “You’re doing fine in your new role,” it bounces off because the problem is that you don’t need cheering up. The problem is that your internal standard for competence is still running on your old role’s scoreboard and rules of the game, and you cannot get yourself out of that just by someone tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “You’re fine.”

You have to actually update your definition of competence in your new role. Now there’s some good research on this, and one consistent finding is that when our competence feels threatened, the brain processes it almost the same way it processes a threat to our identity.

It feels like who I am is in question, not just what I’m doing. And to take this a step further, when we feel a threat, like a social threat that my competence isn’t seen, that my identity is being questioned, it actually comes from a survival instinct. If I’m being socially threatened, then I might be excluded from the tribe, and if that were to happen, I’m likely going to die.

So any time the social threats come up, the emotional response is literally a survival strategy to say, “Uh-oh, what do I need to do to not experience this social threat? Because if this becomes real, I might be excluded from the tribe, and then a saber-toothed tiger’s going to eat me.” Now, therefore, it’s a very natural response to that feeling, which is to solidify your competence and to make sure that everyone knows how good you were in your old work, or to make sure that you insert yourself into meetings and that you have a say, that you’re being seen as the person behind the scenes or who’s actively involved, sort of to defend your position.

This is a natural instinct, but it’s not effective and not helpful, and it likely gets you the opposite result because people start to ask, “Why are they hanging on to this so much? Why are they defending their reputation so much?” People start to read between the lines that this actually comes from a place of insecurity, not from a place of confidence.

So if you find yourself diving back into the technical tasks, the things that you were great at because it gives you that hit of, “I’m good at this,” meanwhile your actual leadership responsibilities, the ones that feel awkward and slow because you’re new at them, they will start to drift. And when you understand that our brains really try to avoid pain and seek pleasure, it makes perfect sense that the old thing that gave you a lot of reward is the thing that you’re going to gravitate to versus the new thing that seems ambiguous, that you feel unsure of, not quite competent yet.

You don’t really fully know what you’re doing. And so you might avoid that and instead get busy with busy work, getting yourself involved with technical stuff again. This happens all the time. For example, I coached a new manager who three months in was still working on his team’s most important deliverables himself because he could not stand the idea of sending out work to other teams that he didn’t do or didn’t have a hand in himself. Then in his own 90-day review, he got the feedback that he wasn’t developing his people, he was being a bottleneck, he was not delegating enough. He wasn’t fully owning the leadership role. And so it was clear that he was just working hard at the wrong job. He was working really hard, actually, but doing the wrong thing.

Now, there’s also a quieter trap in here. This is the constant comparison, not just to a report, but sometimes to a peer who seems more naturally suited to leading. The more you measure your fumbling early leadership conversations and practices against someone else’s already polished execution, the more out of place you feel. Your year one is always going to be different from someone else’s year five. Your year five will be very different from your year one. So it is important to remember that when we compare ourselves to others, we want to compare ourselves on actual equal playing fields, not compare two different things, when the comparison in that case was basically rigged from the start.

Now this transition that we’re talking about, from being the person who does the work to being the person who leads it, is the entire reason we built the Leadership Accelerator.

According to CEB, sixty percent of new managers fail or underperform in their first eighteen months of the job. And so the odds are against you. If you want to be successful in your first leadership role, don’t wing it.

This is an entirely new skill set. It requires not just new practices and routines, but a complete shift in how you see yourself, your identity, how you position yourself in this new role. And learning all this on your own is really hard to do. In our ninety-day manager readiness program, the Leadership Accelerator, we specifically work with new and early-stage managers, people who were excellent individual contributors and now have to build a completely different set of skills in their leadership role.

We work on exactly the kind of things we talk about here: how to delegate, how to think at the project level, how to find your footing in a new role, and gain respect and trust of both your peers, your manager, and your team, instead of retreating to this old definition of competence, which will actually backfire within the first three to six months.

The program includes both on-demand components that make it super flexible, as well as coaching as a small group and one-on-one support. And so the curriculum and the structure of this program is the reason why we’ve had proven results and excellent feedback with this program over the last seven years.

This has been proven and tested. So check out the link in the show notes to archova.org/leadership-accelerator to learn more, and hear from other managers who’ve gone through the program and how much their leadership has improved so they were more competent and felt more confident at the end of the 90 days.

Okay, let’s get back to it. So here’s how to actually move through this process of re-shifting where you pay attention. The first thing is to get clear, concretely, on what the new role rewards, so you stop grading yourself on this retired version of a job.

And specifically, I would sit down and write it out. In my old role, success meant this. In my new role, success means that. It usually looks like the difference between I produced the best work and the team produced great work that I could not have produced alone. When you can see those side by side, the comparison to your high-performing report kind of loses its grip because you can actually see you are not even playing the same game that they are.

You have a completely different role. And so writing it out, and it may seem a bit tedious to actually use pen and paper here, but that is the process that allows you to process it internally and then start to change the way that you think. The second thing is to name your distinct value in this new seat.

There is something only the person in the leadership chair can do, like set the direction, remove obstacles by advocating upwards or sideways, develop the people, make the call when the path is not clear, connect the work to the bigger picture, foresee what is needed on the team in twelve, 18, 24 months.

Your report, as good as they are at executing, isn’t doing any of that, or it is not their main job to do that. That is truly your contribution, and it is not smaller than theirs. It is just different, and the work of doing that is going to feel different too.

It might feel less like busywork and more like thinking work or planning work or being in meetings. Completely different from actually executing on tasks. So when you catch yourself thinking, “They would be better at my job,” the honest correction is, “They would be better at the tasks, and my job is not the tasks anymore.” So speaking of the chair that you’re sitting in, sometimes even making it physical, ask yourself in the moments when you notice, “Oh, I’m diving back into the old work,” pause and ask, “Which chair are you sitting in right now?”

The doer’s chair or the leader’s chair? If you’re in the doer’s chair and the leader’s chair is empty over there, but someone should be sitting in it, someone needs to do the work of the leader, then you know you’re in the wrong chair because no one else can sit in that chair but you. But you have people on your team who could sit in the doer’s chair.

That leader’s chair can never be empty or completely abandoned. That’s not to say that you never roll up your sleeves and get into the work and into the weeds. That is not the point. But you do that deliberately from the perspective of, as a leader, I need to know or I need to understand, not, oh, I feel better in the doer’s chair and I’m more competent here, which is why I do it and I abandon my leadership role.

Okay. So just naming the chair pulls you back into the seat that you’re actually supposed to be in. So taking a step back here, growing into this role does not mean the old you was not good enough. The discomfort you feel is not evidence that you do not belong in the leadership role.

It is simply the feeling of adding a new layer to who you are, not replacing a previous layer at all. So you moving into leadership is development, and it is additive, not replacing something. It is additive. And therefore you are not trading in a version of yourself.

Because individual contributors are measured by what they personally produce, while you as a leader are measured by what your team is capable of. They are different jobs with different scoreboards, and the disorientation you might be feeling is just the gap between them, especially during this initial transition into a leadership role.

By being really aware and deliberately building in the practices to make sure that you’re not comparing yourself to your high performer, you’re not feeling threatened, your ego isn’t challenged there, you’re not inserting yourself somehow to satisfy that need, which makes you a less effective leader.

That awareness, and then starting to build the right practices, is where your intention should grow. Your job is really to get comfortable in this bigger role, not to hang on to something from the past. And with that, we’ll see you next week with another episode of the Manager Track Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out at archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my best-selling book, The Confident and Competent New Manager: How to Quickly Rise to Success in Your First Leadership Role. Check it out at archova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there.