The Only Place I Feel Competent
Hi, welcome back. If you’ve been promoted in the last few years, or if you manage someone who has, this one’s going to land differently than the rest.
A CEO I coached last year kept getting the same feedback from his board: stop doing the VP’s job. He knew they were right. He’d been promoted twice in three years, but every time pressure hit, he dropped back into the operational work that used to make him successful. Reviewing code. Sitting in on customer calls. Rewriting the messaging himself. His team wasn’t asking for it. His board was actively telling him to stop. But the pull was almost physical. He described it to me once as “the only place I feel competent.”
I remember sitting across from him and realizing I couldn’t explain it with any framework I’d been taught. It wasn’t about ambition or insecurity in the usual way. It was something quieter, deeper. He wasn’t failing at his new role. He was succeeding at his old one, and that success had become his reference point for who he was.
That’s the thing nobody talks about with senior leadership transitions. The new role doesn’t feel like home yet. The old one does. So when things get hard, you go home. And then you’re exhausted, your team’s confused about where the actual work belongs, and you’re performing below the title on your business card.
I call this the Identity Trap. It’s not a skills gap. It’s an identity gap. The leader you’ve been promoted to be and the leader you still feel yourself to be are two different people. Your calendar, your instincts, your stress responses are all still wired for the old one.
Here’s what happened with the CEO: we named this in a conversation. Once he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it. He stopped it. Not because he had more willpower, but because the pattern had a shape now. You can’t manage what you can’t name.
If something in today’s newsletter described a pattern you’ve suspected but couldn’t name, that’s exactly what Executive Triage is built for. One conversation. One pattern named with enough precision that you can’t unknow it. $3,500. cynthiacorsetti.com/executive-triage
This week’s read: Goldsmith’s whole thesis is that the behaviors that earned you the promotion are the same ones stalling you now. If this week’s opening made you uncomfortable, this book will tell you why that discomfort is the point.
The role you were promoted into is not the role you were promoted from. And the hardest part isn’t learning new skills. It’s letting go of the identity that earned you the title.