We typically think of a promotion as an addition. After all, a promotion usually comes with a bigger title, a larger team or scope, and more authority.
I felt the same way every time I got promoted through my career - from an engineer to a manager to a director.
But in this piece I’m going to argue that promotions actually take something away from you, and for good reason.
And if you don’t let it go on purpose, it will take you down with it.
Here’s what I mean.
The promotion is sold as an addition, when it’s actually a subtraction.
Nobody promotes you and asks you to stop doing what you did before, right?
Recall the last time you got promoted at work.
Your manager congratulated you on the new responsibilities, the new title, and then likely left you to “figure things out” on your own.
Correct?
And then, within six to nine months of being promoted, you realized that what used to be your strengths in the previous role were now becoming your weaknesses in the new role.
Let’s say that you were a software engineer who was technically strong and could solve the hardest problems thrown at you. And because of that, you got promoted to a “manager.”
Then, in this new role, you suddenly had a team to manage, a release to deliver, and you naturally stuck to your traditional “strengths”… which was to continue solving everything for the team.
And when you did that, here’s what happened: you ended up depriving your team members of the growth and learning opportunities, instead of creating more of them.
As another example, let’s say that you were an excellent manager and led your team from the front, and knew every detail of the org. So, naturally, you got promoted to director. Now, when you were trying to be “rigorous” and “in-touch” like you always were before, your teams thought that you didn’t trust them anymore.
💬 Have you noticed this irony? Let me know in the comments!
That’s the subtraction I’m talking about.
The subtraction happened because you kept doing the job that got you the promotion, but didn’t realize that the new position actually needed something completely different.
And you know what’s the hardest part? This is really hard to detect, because your behavior typcially shows up as a “virtue”.
You tell yourself that “I care about quality”, or “I want to stay close to the work”, or “I hold the bar high”, etc. and those sound like great virtues to stick with, but they’re also the same things that are actually holding you back.
In fact, those are the very things that you need to let go of, that you need to subtract, if you want to be successful in your new role.
The higher you go, the harder it gets to see
When you’re junior in the corporate ladder - say, a software engineer, or an entry-level analyst - you usually get direct feedback. In your feedback conversation, your manager tells you “Gaurav, you need to delegate more,” and you start working on it right away.
But as you climb up the corporate ladder, things start to change rapidly.
Your colleagues, your stakeholders, your team members - they all start “managing up” instead of just talking to you. And before you know it, the honest feedback starts to dry up.
💬 Have you noticed this too? Let me know in the comments.
Your calendar gets filled up with meetings with people who are either telling you what you want to hear, or whose actual job is to keep you comfortable. Chiefs of Staff were supposed to keep their bosses honest and accountable, but I’ve seen that role degenerate into “filtering what the boss wants to hear”.
Here’s the trap:
The people with the most power and authority get the least honest feedback about the thing that they need to hear.
I’ve been in meetings where our VP made a decision that most of us in the room knew was just wrong, but nobody said so. And it wasn’t because the people in the room were cowards, but because the last couple of times they pushed back, they didn’t get the response from the VP that they expected. So… they “adapted”.
And here’s the scary part: this trap compounds.
When you get less feedback, you become more certain and confident that “you’re right”. If you’ve ever seen a leader with a team that organizes itself around “not upsetting him”, that’s the trap, and it’s compounding in action.
The telltale signs
So, how can you tell if you’ve fallen into this trap?
The biggest sign is this:
If you can’t let go of something that you used to do yourself, even after you got promoted, that’s a sign that you’re holding on to the old identity.
A few examples:
The new software manager who just can’t stop writing code himself (I used to be this!)
The senior manager who reviews every presentation deck before it is sent out.
The director who has to be in every decision made by the team
As discussed earlier, the justification for their behavior is tied to a virtue that’s, let’s fact it, hard to question.
They call it “high standards” or “being thorough” or “caring about the work”.
And there’s a second, more subtle sign:
Whatever you complain about your team not doing is usually the exact thing you haven’t stopped doing for them.
A manager once told me that her team was “not taking ownership”.
She used to review and literally rewrite every plan that her leads put together. In her own eyes, she was “being thorough,” but in her team’s eyes she had never actually handed over any ownership to them at all.
That’s the telltale sign.
A quick checklist for you
So how do you find out which one is still running you?
Go ahead and pick up a pen and paper and spend 10-15 minutes answering them with honesty:
What is the one thing on your team that you still refuse to hand off, no matter how good the reason sounds?
If someone else did that thing and did it worse for a while, how does that make you feel, and why?
What would you have to stop believing about yourself for that to be fine?
Name the person (or persons) on your team whose growth is capped right now because you haven’t let this go.
If you got promoted again tomorrow, what would you keep doing out of habit that the new role wouldn’t actually need?
💬 I would love to know in the comments, too, what comes out of this self-reflection.
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While serving as president of a college, once my mind had settled into the role, I asked myself two questions twice a year.
1. What is it that only the president can do? Delegate the rest.
2. What is the one thing what will advance the college? Monitor the rest.
This helped me decide where to focus my energy and time.