Identity: Expert vs Leader

Your expertise got you promoted. That same expertise might be what's making leadership feel harder than it should.

Engineers and technical leaders spend years building an identity around knowing. Knowing the answer. Knowing the system. Being the person people come to when things break.

That identity gets reinforced every day — by the projects, the credibility, the quiet satisfaction of being genuinely good at something hard.

Then the role changes. The technical problems shrink. The people problems grow.

The old ways of proving worth stop working as well. But nobody tells you that. Most organizations hand you a new title and expect you to sort out the rest yourself.

I didn't figure this out in theory. I stumbled into it.

When my business was just me, my identity was a bit of everything — sales, operations, admin, whatever needed doing. But sales drove revenue, so that's where most of my energy went. Sales became the thing I was. When I started hiring and the business grew, my role was changing, but I kept defaulting to what I knew. I'd sit with my own team members and end up deep in product specs, technical details, the mechanics of a deal. That was my comfort zone. That was how I showed I was useful.

Except that's not what they needed.

What they needed was the benefit of my experience — not a copy of it. They had their own history, their own way of reading people and situations. My job was to figure out how what I'd learned could connect to what they already had. Not to hand them my playbook, but to help them build their own. That meeting point — between my experience and their identity — that's where I actually became useful as a leader.

It changed how I understood my own worth. As a salesperson, value was pretty clear: you either moved the deal or you didn't. As a leader, it's murkier. The measure isn't what you do. It's what gets unlocked in the people around you because of what you've brought to the table.

Most leaders don't make that transition cleanly, and I don't think it's mostly a skill problem. The skills can be learned. What's harder to update is the internal story — the belief about what makes you worth having in the room. That belief usually got written during the expert years, and it doesn't automatically rewrite itself just because the job title changed.

The work isn't to abandon what you know. It's to stop using it as the only proof that you belong.

One coaching question to sit with:

When was the last time you felt genuinely useful as a leader — not because you solved something, but because someone else did?