3 Overlooked Leadership Skills That Matter More as You Grow
Written by Jaime Waterfield, Leadership Development Coach
Jaime Waterfield brings more than 25 years of experience across technology, software, and services organizations to her work as a Leadership Development Coach. With a career spanning nearly all functions of the business, she helps leaders build sustainable, business-grounded leadership as they navigate growth and increased responsibility.
What if becoming a stronger leader isn't always about adding another skill? Across my own leadership experience and conversations with coaching clients, I see the same challenges surface consistently: getting clear on what matters most, determining how much effort it actually requires, and knowing what is truly ours to own. This article explores three practices that can help leaders make those choices with greater intention.
Why does leadership require more discernment as you grow?
Early in our careers, growth is often easy to recognize. We learn new skills, take on more responsibility, solve increasingly complex problems, and become more capable. Eventually, though, capability itself can create a challenge. The more capable we become, the more we can take on. We can solve the problem, so we tackle it. We can step in to fix something when it isn't working. We can improve the presentation, rewrite the email, stay late to finish the project, or find a way to make just about anything better. Simply because we can, we often do.
However, the skills that help us succeed aren't always the same ones required to lead at the next level. I explored a similar tension in my article on the competence trap, where established strengths can eventually become constraints on future growth. As responsibility grows, leadership becomes less about demonstrating how much we can do and more about discerning where we contribute the most value.
The question is no longer simply whether you can do something, but whether it is the best use of your time, energy, and attention. In my coaching work, I have identified three practices that help leaders make this shift: clarifying what matters most, matching effort to the need, and distinguishing what they truly own.
3 leadership practices that matter more as you grow
1. Define success: Get clear on what matters most
I frequently ask my coaching clients what success looks like for a specific meeting, conversation, project, or week. Without consciously defining success, it is easy to spend our time responding to what is urgent, what others expect, or simply what is directly in front of us. We can stay incredibly busy while still ending the week wondering what we actually accomplished.
Defining success creates clarity about what matters most in this moment. Success is contextual, and what matters most will change with the situation, priority, or season. For a meeting, success might mean aligning on three priorities. For a difficult conversation, it might mean communicating clearly and respectfully. For the week, it might mean making meaningful progress on two important initiatives. The point is to define success around the progress that matters, rather than the volume of activity completed.
Once success is defined, it becomes a filter for decisions and action. You can more easily determine what deserves your attention, which opportunities or demands support the outcome you're working toward, and which ones are simply distractions. When everything could matter, defining success helps leaders decide what matters most right now and align their attention and actions accordingly.
2. Be a challenger: Match your effort to the need
Once success is clear, the next question is how much effort is required to achieve it. We often think being a challenger means questioning other people's ideas, but some of the most important assumptions leaders need to challenge are their own. High performers often carry an internal standard that says the work should be perfect. However, not everything requires the same level of excellence. Sometimes, good enough genuinely is good enough. Being a challenger means questioning the automatic instinct to give everything maximum effort. Before investing more time and energy, ask:
Does this need to be this hard?
Can this be adjusted to fit the need?
What does this situation actually require?
Am I solving for the real need or for a standard I've created myself?
Matching effort to the need doesn't mean lowering standards where excellence matters. It means becoming more intentional about where excellence matters most. A customer presentation, strategic decision, or difficult leadership conversation may deserve significant preparation, while a problem that takes five minutes may not need a solution that takes fifty minutes.
As responsibility expands, the ability to match effort to the need becomes increasingly important because leadership capacity is finite. Giving everything 110% doesn't guarantee greater impact. Sometimes it simply leaves less capacity for the work that actually deserves it.
3. Stay in your lane: Be clear about what you own
Knowing what success requires doesn't mean you need to personally own everything required to achieve it. As responsibility grows, leadership requires recognizing that not every problem you can solve is yours to solve.
Staying in your lane is not about becoming less collaborative or refusing to help. It is about distinguishing between ownership and influence. There will be things you directly own, things you can influence, and things that belong to someone else, even when you know you could step in and make them better.
When leaders repeatedly cross those lines, their workload expands while other people's ownership shrinks. Over time, they become increasingly involved in work that prevents them from focusing on the responsibilities only they can fulfill.
Before stepping in, pause and ask: “Is this mine to carry?” If the answer is no, consider what the situation requires from you instead. It might be asking a question, providing context, removing a barrier, coaching someone through the problem, or simply allowing another person to own the outcome. Just because something matters doesn't mean it's yours to carry. Sometimes the most valuable leadership decision is deciding not to take something on.
Leadership growth is not always about doing more
Experience expands what leaders are capable of doing. Discernment determines where that capability creates the greatest value. Knowing what matters most, investing the right level of effort, and recognizing what is truly yours to own create greater intentionality in how you lead.
The next level of leadership may not ask more of you. It may ask you to choose more deliberately what deserves the capability you already have.
If you're navigating expanded leadership responsibility and finding that doing more is no longer creating greater impact, book a coaching call. Together, we can identify what matters most, where your leadership creates the most value, and how to focus your capacity in ways that support both your effectiveness and continued growth.
Read more from Jaime Waterfield
Jaime Waterfield, Leadership Development Coach
Jaime Waterfield is a Leadership Development Coach with more than 25 years of experience in technology, software, and services organizations. Having worked across nearly all functions of the business, she brings a rare, end‑to‑end perspective to leadership development. Her work focuses on helping leaders build sustainable leadership capability that aligns people, performance, and business outcomes. Through AspiHER, her signature women’s leadership program, she supports women navigating growth, promotion, or expanded leadership responsibility in gaining clarity, setting sustainable boundaries, and leading with confidence without burning out or losing momentum.
