Most technical leaders are promoted for the same reason: they're the best problem-solver in the room. The organisation rewards the person who delivers, so it hands them more to deliver. And the superpower that earned the promotion quietly becomes the thing that limits them.
My friend and colleague Dr. Byron Rigby calls it the bottleneck crisis. It's the point where a leader's personal brilliance stops being the engine of results and starts being the ceiling on them.
In The Gentle Art of Leadership, Dean Phelan and I write about Darrell, who put much of his career success down to solving complex problems. As he moved into more senior roles, he found he couldn't solve everything himself. Nor should he. Holding on to that belief meant a future of ever-rising demands and ever-rising blame when things went wrong. So he changed the job he thought he had, from the person who solves things to the person who gets things done through others.
That sounds like a small adjustment. It isn't. It's a complete identity reconstruction.
It helps to be clear about the alternative. Genius founders like Bill Gates get a lot of airtime in this conversation, and they deserve an asterisk. Harvard's Noam Wasserman, studying thousands of founders, found that four in five founder-CEOs are eventually forced out. Gates gets the attention because he's rare, not because he's typical.
Even if you're not running a startup, the trap is the same: the expertise that earned your promotion is now the thing capping your team.
This is the part AI makes more important, not less. As the analytical work gets automated, the scarce skill is the human one, getting a result through people when you can't just be the smartest person in the room. I argued last week that the organisations that win are the ones that get results through people, not despite them.
The leaders who make the shift don't stop being smart. They redirect where their intelligence goes. The real move is from 'I build the machine' to 'I build the builders': less energy on the problem in front of them, more on the people who'll face the next ten after they've moved on.
In your experience, what do the best leaders actually do to build the people around them?
If that's the work you're interested in, I'm running a free introductory session on it on Friday 19 June, 11:00am AEST. I'd love to see you there. Registration: donovanleadership.com/pbt-introductory-session
Best regards, Brian