When Your Title Changes, Your Work Needs to Change, Too
Moving up in responsibility doesn’t automatically erase the instincts that made you successful. If being in the details (AKA, the weeds) were a big part of your job before, it’s completely natural to keep going there. The weeds are familiar. They’re where you’ve built confidence and credibility.
But you have got to stop it.
Being in the weeds feels productive because it’s familiar. You can jump in, fix things quickly and keep everything moving. But when you’re always in the details, you’re not leaving room for the work that only you can do. In a more senior role, that “only you” work typically includes:
Vision and alignment: ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Prioritization: saying no (and explaining why) so the team can say yes to the right things.
Decision-making: especially the hard calls that require tradeoffs.
Stakeholder management: translating across silos, building trust, eliminating surprises.
Talent development: growing people so the department/division can scale.
Creating the conditions for excellence: processes, expectations and culture.
When you spend your day editing someone’s work for the tenth time, you are trading away leadership capacity for a temporary sense of control.
The goal isn’t to disappear. The goal is to stop being the single point of failure.
A helpful principle: be deeply involved in the beginning and the end and lighter in the middle.
At the beginning: clarify purpose, priorities, constraints and success measures.
In the middle: check in on progress, remove roadblocks and ask smart questions.
At the end: review outcomes, capture lessons learned and improve the system.
One of the great paradoxes of moving up is that the more you cling to the weeds, the less you actually lead. You don’t rise by doing more. You rise by enabling more.
And if you’re feeling that discomfort of letting go? Good. That’s the sound of your leadership capacity expanding.
If you’ve recently stepped into a bigger role, ask yourself this: What needs my attention because only I can do it and what am I holding onto out of habit?
