The Mistake Everyone Makes When They Get Promoted

You got promoted because you were good at the previous job. This is logical. This is also a trap.

Your new job is different from your old job. You are not better at it. You are a novice at it. Everyone around you is expecting you to be good at it immediately because you were good at the other thing. You are expecting it too.

The instinct that kills most people in this position is the instinct to work harder at the thing you know. You write better code, or you think through the architecture more carefully, or you spend more time on the code review comments. You double down on the skill that got you promoted.

This is backwards. The job is not asking you to be better at the thing you were already good at. The job is asking you to be competent at something completely new. The problem is that working harder at the old skill feels productive and the new skill feels uncomfortable.

What Actually Needs to Happen

You need to admit that you don't know how to do the new job and you need to learn in public.

Learning in public means that when someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, you say "I don't know, let's figure it out together" instead of "let me get back to you" and then spending three hours researching in a vacuum so you can give a confident answer. The first approach is faster and also signals to the team that it is okay to not know things.

Learning in public means that when you make a decision that turns out to be wrong, you don't hide it. You say what you thought was true, what turned out to be true, and what you are changing. This teaches the team how to learn from mistakes instead of how to cover them up.

Learning in public means that you are willing to ask for feedback from people who report to you. Not "am I doing a good job?" That's performance review territory. I mean "this decision I made doesn't feel right in hindsight, what am I missing?" That makes it clear that you are thinking and learning and open to being wrong, which is what actually builds trust.

What You're Actually Doing

Every person who has been promoted is terrified of exactly one thing: that everyone is going to figure out that they don't know what they are doing. This is called impostor syndrome and it is almost universal. So people work really hard to hide it by working really hard at the thing they know how to do.

What people actually see is someone who is either great at their old job or good at their new job, but not someone who is learning. Which one would you trust more in a leadership position? The person who is clearly figuring things out and is transparent about what they don't know, or the person who is really good at the work they used to do but seems uncertain when asked to make decisions at a different level?

The trust is built by competence at the new job, not by continued excellence at the old one.

How to Actually Do It

Pick something in the new job that you need to learn. Maybe it is how to have hard conversations. Maybe it is how to think about architecture for the whole system instead of your piece. Maybe it is how to unblock people without doing the work for them. Pick something.

Then be bad at it on purpose. Have the conversation. It might be awkward. Write about the architecture decision in a document. It might be clumsy at first. Coach someone through a problem without solving it for them. You will feel like you are wasting their time. You are not. You are investing in learning something that will make you better at the job you were promoted into.

The fear is that people will see you being bad at something and lose confidence. What actually happens is that people respect the willingness to learn. They also learn that it is okay to be new at things and to ask for help, which is a way more valuable message than "the lead is really good at the thing they used to do."

I was terrible at having difficult conversations when I got promoted. I knew this. So I committed to having more of them and being visibly bad at them until I wasn't. A year in, it was fine. More than fine. It was actually a strength. But that only happened because I stopped trying to hide the learning and started trying to do the learning.

The people who struggle most with promotion are the people who try to keep being excellent at the old job while simultaneously doing a new job they have not learned yet. They work 60 hours a week, burn out, and then they are not good at either job.

Stop working harder at what you already know. Start learning at what you don't. The work that got you promoted is not the work that keeps you promoted. The willingness to learn the new work is.