Why the Skills That Got You Promoted Are the Ones Now Holding You Back
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
Written by Andrew Buzinsky, Business Coach
Andrew Buzinsky is a business performance coach and former executive who works with founders and senior leaders to grow their business and leadership. He brings practical experience and a straight-talking coaching style to help leaders think clearly and execute with confidence.
You were the best engineer, the sharpest accountant, the most reliable technical mind on the team. That is exactly why you were promoted. It may also be exactly why you are now struggling, working harder than you ever have, while your team moves slower than it should. This is the promotion trap, and almost no one is warned about it before they walk into it. Here is what it is, why it happens to the strongest people specifically, and the first step out of it.
The day the rules change and nobody tells you
I spent three decades in the corporate world before I left it. My last corporate role was starting and running a business that we grew to more than 120 million dollars in revenue, with profit-and-loss responsibility for over 500 people across twelve countries. I have hired brilliantly and I have hired badly. I have promoted people who soared and people who quietly suffered. After that chapter, I left the corporate world to build Rodina Ventures and other businesses, and to spend my time on the transition I had watched go wrong more than any other.
That transition is this one. The person who is best at the work gets promoted to lead the people who do the work. The day that happens, the definition of being good at your job silently changes. Nobody announces the change. There is no memo. The title changes, the business card changes, and everyone assumes you will simply figure out the rest.
You were promoted for one job and handed another one
You were promoted for being the person with the answers. You are now being paid to build a team that does not need you to have the answers. Those are not the same job. They are closer to opposites. The skill that earned you the title is not the skill the title now requires, and no one tells you that on the day the role changes.
A scene I have watched more times than I can count
There is a leader I think about often. He is not one person. He is every third or fourth technical leader I have ever worked with, which is the only reason I can describe him so precisely.
He was the strongest individual contributor on his team. When something was hard, it went to him, and he solved it, and he was proud of that, and he should have been. Then he got promoted to lead the team. Six months in, here is his actual week.
The week that looks like diligence is actually decline
He arrives early because that is the only quiet time he gets. By nine, his calendar is other people’s problems. Someone is stuck, so he unsticks them, because he knows exactly how and it takes him fifteen minutes when it would take them two days. By noon, he had solved four problems that were not supposed to be his anymore. He tells himself he will get to his real work after hours. He does. He answers the strategic questions at nine at night, alone and exhausted, while his team has gone home having learned nothing, because he did their thinking for them again.
He is working harder than he ever worked as an individual contributor. His team is moving slower than it should. He cannot see the connection between those two facts, and the connection is the whole problem.
Why does this happen to the good ones specifically
Here is the part that surprises people. This does not happen because the person is weak. It happens because the person is strong, in exactly the wrong direction for the new role.
Technical experts have spent years building something rare: deep, reliable competence. That competence is not just a skill. It is an identity. It is where their confidence lives. When you put that person into a leadership role, you have placed them in a situation where they are suddenly and profoundly not competent, and they know it, and it is intolerable.
Expert-mode retreat
So they do the most human thing possible. Under pressure, they retreat to the place where they feel competent again. They go back to the technical work. Not because they are lazy or avoidant, but because it is the only place in the new job where they still feel good at something.
I call this expert-mode retreat, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The new leader who reviews every piece of work personally because the standard matters. The new manager whose one-on-ones are really just status updates because real coaching conversations require a competence not yet built. The new director who reorganizes the spreadsheet at midnight because the spreadsheet, at least, obeys. Every one of those behaviors looks like diligence. Every one of them is actually retreat.
The compound cost nobody calculates
A retreat for one week costs nothing. The problem is that it does not stay for one week. Every time you solve the problem your team member should have solved, you teach them something. You teach them that bringing you the finished thinking is not required, because you will do the rest. You are, with the best of intentions, training your most expensive resource, your own judgment, to be the bottleneck for everything. Then one day you look up and you are the constraint on your entire team’s output. The very thing you were promoted to remove, you have become. Not through failure. Through competence, misapplied.
If you are the leader who promoted this person
A note to a different reader, because some of you did not get promoted into the trap. You are the one who did the promoting. You took your strongest technical person and gave them a team, because that is what you are supposed to do, and because they earned it. Months later, you can see something is off. The work is slower. The person looks tired in a way they did not before. You are not sure whether to step in, wait it out, or quietly conclude you misjudged them.
You did not misjudge them. You made the same incomplete decision that almost every organization makes. Promoting a technical expert is only half a decision. The other half is deciding how they will learn to lead, and most companies skip that half entirely and call the result a development opportunity. It is not a development opportunity. It is an unmanaged risk, sitting on top of a person you cannot afford to lose, on a team you need to perform. I spent three decades on your side of that decision. I know how expensive the skipped half gets, and how rarely anyone connects the cost back to its actual cause.
What the trap is made of
If you strip it all the way down, the promotion trap is built from one false belief: that leadership is an extension of expertise. If you are good enough at the work, you will naturally be good at leading the work.
You will not. Not because you are not capable, but because they are different capabilities, and the second one was never taught to you, because everyone assumed it would arrive on its own with the title. It does not arrive on its own. It has to be built deliberately, the same way your technical expertise was built deliberately, over years, with intention and feedback and repetition.
The good news is the same as the bad news
It is a set of skills. Skills can be learned. The leaders I have seen escape this trap did not do it by becoming different people. They did it by accepting that the new role was a new discipline, and then treating it the way they had treated every other discipline they had ever mastered: seriously, structurally, and with help. This is the work I now do through Rodina’s leadership acceleration intensives, built specifically for technical experts making this exact transition.
What to do with this, starting now
I am not going to end this with a pitch. I am going to end it with something you can use, whether or not we ever speak.
The counting exercise
This week, track one number. Count the times you solved a problem that, in a healthy version of your team, someone else should have solved. Do not judge it. Just count it. Most technical leaders who do this honestly are shocked by the number, and the shock is the beginning of the change. You cannot fix a pattern you cannot see, and this exercise makes the pattern visible in about three days.
If that number is high, you are in the trap that almost every strong technical person walks into. It’s because the system promoted you for one set of skills and then quietly started grading you on another. That is a transition nobody prepared you for.
The next step, if you want one
It is also the exact transition I now spend my professional life helping people through. If reading this felt less like learning something new and more like being seen, that is not an accident. The counting exercise is yours to keep, regardless. If you want to talk about what comes after it, you can book a free discovery call. It is not a sales pitch. It is a working session, and you will leave it with something real, whether or not we ever work together.
If you are the leader who promoted someone into this, the one I spoke to in the middle of this article, here is the other half of the decision you did not get to make at the time. The transition can be supported deliberately instead of left to chance. The cost of doing that is a fraction of the cost of the promotion failing, or of losing the person entirely. You will know which of your people this is about. You probably thought of them by name somewhere around the middle of this article. That same conversation is open to you.
Read more from Andrew Buzinsky
Andrew Buzinsky, Business Coach
Andrew Buzinsky is a business performance coach and former executive who works with founders and senior leaders to grow their business and leadership. He has been in the seat, building and scaling companies, and dealing with real moments of pressure, including figuring out how to make payroll in his first week as a company president. Andrew is a CPA and engineer with an MBA, but he is known more for his practical, straight-talking approach than for his credentials. Through Rodina Ventures, he helps leaders cut through noise, make better decisions, and build businesses that actually work. His focus is simple, to help leaders think better so they can lead better.
