Feeling comfortable in your new leadership role? Something's wrong.

One of the most difficult transitions in working life is the move from expert to leader. 

As an expert, your value is visible. You understand the subject, solve difficult problems and provide answers. At the end of the day, you can often point to something you personally achieved.  Leadership is different. Your value increasingly lies in what other people are able to achieve because of you. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it can be deeply uncomfortable. 

A new leader may leave a meeting having asked several good questions, helped the team reach a decision and ensured that the right person takes responsibility. Yet it may not feel as satisfying as solving the problem personally. There is less immediate evidence of contribution. The leader may even wonder what, exactly, they added. 

That discomfort is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong. It may be evidence that the transition to leadership is beginning to work. The temptation is to retreat to familiar ground. When a problem arises in an area you know well, it is quicker and more comfortable to take over. You can probably produce a better answer, at least in the short term. You also regain the reassuring feeling of being useful. 

But every time you step in unnecessarily, you risk weakening the very capability you are supposed to be building. Your team learns that the most difficult problems will eventually come back to you. People become less willing to exercise judgement because they expect their decisions to be corrected. You remain indispensable, but for precisely the wrong reason. 

This does not mean that leaders should suppress their expertise. Experience is valuable. The challenge is to use it differently. Instead of providing the answer immediately, ask what the team has already considered. Test the assumptions behind their thinking. Help them identify who else needs to be involved. Explain the principles that inform your judgement without taking the decision away from them. 

Sometimes you will need to intervene. Leadership is not passive observation, and allowing people to fail carelessly is not development. The question is whether you are stepping in because the organisation genuinely needs your experience, or because taking control makes you feel more comfortable.  That is an important distinction. 

The next stage is to build a team that needs progressively less intervention. Regular development conversations matter, but they should go beyond discussing current performance. Leaders need to identify who could take on broader responsibility, what experiences those people need and where they can safely be given more authority. 

This is succession planning at its most practical. It is not simply about identifying who might one day replace you. It is about creating enough leadership capacity for the team to operate effectively without every decision travelling upwards. 

A useful test is to ask: if I disappeared for a month, what would stop? The answer reveals where you have built capability and where you remain a bottleneck. New leaders often believe they should feel confident once they have earned the role. In reality, they may feel less certain than before. They are working through other people, dealing with problems outside their original expertise and judging success over longer periods. They have exchanged the certainty of knowing for the ambiguity of enabling. 

Some discomfort is therefore entirely appropriate.  The aim is not to eliminate it by returning to the work you already know how to do. It is to become comfortable enough with discomfort to keep asking questions, trust other people and create the conditions in which they can succeed. 

That is when an expert begins to become a leader.