Category: Managing your career

What You Lose Every Time You Get Promoted

Organizations rarely name what actually happens when you get promoted: each transition destroys your identity. The capabilities and ways of working that made you successful at one level become obsolete at the next. Every promotion is not an expansion of capability. It is the death of one professional identity and the birth of another. And that destruction follows a recursive pattern that compounds with every promotion.

The recursive pattern

When you move from individual contributor to manager, you lose the satisfaction of creating tangible output and must find meaning in developing others. When you move from manager to manager of managers, you lose direct contact with individual development and must find meaning in shaping systems. When you move to organizational leadership, you lose decisive ownership of your domain and must find meaning in collaborative deliberation with peers.

Each transition asks you to surrender the identity and capabilities that made you successful at the previous level. The engineering manager who writes code at night isn’t integrating her technical skills. She’s trying to keep a dead identity on life support.

And each time, the new identity is more abstract:

  • IC identity: “I wrote this code. I designed this system.” You can point to the thing you made today.
  • Manager identity: “My team shipped this feature.” You can still see the output, even if your hands didn’t create it.
  • Manager of Managers identity: “The organization delivered these results.” The causal chain is longer.
  • Organizational Leader identity: “We navigated this tension productively and made a better collective decision.” Your contribution is the quality of the deliberative process itself, almost entirely invisible.

Each level is harder to inhabit, harder to feel competent in, provides less immediate satisfaction. The grief compounds because just when you’ve finally learned to derive meaning from the abstraction, just when you’ve built a new professional identity and found your footing, you get promoted. You spend two years discovering that your value comes from developing your team rather than doing the work yourself. You finally feel the satisfaction when someone you coached has a breakthrough. And then we promote you. That direct development work you just learned to love? Not your job anymore.

The refuge of power

Leaders retreat to what they know, seeking refuge in an identity they know how to inhabit. Where they can still feel competent. Where their expertise still matters in ways they can directly experience. Where they have control over variables that produce tangible outcomes.

When you can no longer derive identity from what you produce, you grab for identity through what you can control. Power becomes the refuge from abstraction and loss. You reach for certainty because deciding means you don’t have to sit in ambiguity. You seek visibility because when people do what you say, you can see your impact. You tighten control because determining outcomes means you’re not dependent on others. You validate your expertise by ensuring people defer to you, proving you still matter.

The CEO who micromanages is seeking the feeling of competence through control because they never successfully grieved the loss of hands-on creation. The executive who dominates meetings is grasping for the certainty of “being right” because the ambiguity of collaborative deliberation provides no ground to stand on.

Organizations full of individually capable leaders become toxic political environments because they promoted people into identity-destroying transitions without support. But this isn’t only psychological failure. It’s structural design. Organizations reward executives who “take charge” and “drive results,” language that encodes a bias toward unilateral control over collaborative deliberation. The very behaviors that indicate unprocessed grief are the ones that get celebrated and compensated.

Power is what you reach for when you’re drowning in abstraction and loss. The organizational debt of eroded trust, broken relationships, alliance-building instead of collaboration isn’t a failure of process or skills. It’s unprocessed grief manifesting as destructive behavior.

What I observe in those who navigate this well

The people who make it through these transitions share something I find interesting: they work as if they’re managing one team, the people who report directly to them. Not the team below them. Not peer domains. Not work that now belongs to their reports. Just their team.

This pattern holds at every level. The manager focuses on their direct reports (the ICs). The manager of managers focuses on their direct reports (the managers). The functional leader focuses on their direct reports (the senior managers). The organizational leader focuses on their direct reports and their peers as their working team.

When leaders violate that boundary, managing past their directs or trying to control peer domains, they seem to be using positional power to avoid grief. Staying in an old identity by force. What they’re missing is operational clarity about where their actual leverage is. A manager trying to manage two levels down is working on variables they don’t actually control. Their direct report sits between them and that team. Any attempt to go around them either undermines authority or wastes energy on influence they don’t have.

The leaders who navigate transitions well appear clearer about the actual nature of their work. They identify where their leverage is and stay focused there. But holding that boundary seems to require staying with discomfort when every instinct tells you to reach for the familiar.

What I notice in those who make it through is something that might be called the discipline of non-interference. The capacity to not act when action would provide comfort but undermine others’ development. Leadership as restraint practiced at scale. The hardest transition isn’t learning new skills. It’s learning when not to use the skills that made you successful. Tolerating the space where you’re not the hero, not the expert, not the decider. They hold the boundary as a commitment that seems to force them to discover what contribution means at this level.

What enables someone to stay there long enough to discover new sources of meaning? Those who make it through begin to notice impact in forms they didn’t previously recognize as contribution. They start to see that the abstract work (the quality of a deliberation, the strength of a system, the capability of their team) actually does produce something real, even if their hands never touch it. The question becomes: can you stay in the not-knowing long enough to discover what satisfaction feels like at this level of abstraction?

The expanding scope

What changes at each level isn’t the principle of “manage your team.” What changes is the scope of what you must consider. But here’s the paradox: your scope expands while your leverage contracts.

  • Manager: your team’s work, how it fits into the broader function, coordination with adjacent teams
  • Manager of Managers: the entire functional domain, resource allocation, functional strategy
  • Functional Leader: your function’s role in organizational strategy, dependencies with other functions, how your decisions affect the whole company
  • Organizational Leader: the entire enterprise (market dynamics, competitive landscape, cross-functional tradeoffs, long-term viability)

Yet at every level, you still only directly manage one team. The challenge becomes: How do I make good decisions that account for this massive scope of consideration, when my direct control is limited to developing this small group of people who report to me?

The organization works because everyone is applying the same principle at their level. Each person managing their team, considering their scope, with that same discipline recursing down through every layer.

The reframe

At every level, the people who report to you are contributors. They’re just contributing different things:

  • ICs contribute technical output, functional execution, tangible deliverables
  • Managers contribute team capability, people development, coordinated execution
  • Managers of Managers contribute organizational systems, functional strategy, leadership capacity
  • Functional Leaders contribute cross-functional integration, organizational outcomes, strategic direction

You’re always managing contributors. The nature of their contribution changes, but your job remains the same: enable your contributors to contribute at their level.

And you yourself are a contributor to the level you report to. The manager contributes team capability to the manager of managers. The functional leader contributes cross-functional integration to the organizational leadership team. Everyone is simultaneously managing contributors below them and contributing to the level above them.

You don’t stop being a contributor when you become a manager. You become a different kind of contributor. You don’t stop managing contributors. You manage contributors whose contribution is enabling other contributors. The grief isn’t “I’m no longer a contributor.” It’s “my form of contribution has changed.”

What we’re really asking

Becoming an organizational leader means surrendering decisive control and unilateral authority (the very capabilities that defined functional leadership excellence) and finding meaning in something maximally abstract: the quality of collective deliberation itself. You must derive satisfaction from outcomes you don’t fully control. You must feel competent at work that produces no tangible artifacts. You must find meaning in the deliberative process rather than in decisive action. Your contribution is the quality of your engagement with peers, an identity that only exists in relationship and can’t be fully controlled by any individual.

That’s grief work. Until we name it as such, we’ll keep promoting people into identity-destroying transitions without support, creating the organizational debt of broken relationships and toxic politics, then wondering why smart, capable leaders keep struggling with cross-functional collaboration.

Navigating these transitions requires yet another surrender of what made you successful, yet another grief process for what you’ve lost, and yet another discovery of meaning in increasing abstraction. All while everyone pretends it’s just learning new collaboration skills.

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photo by CHUTTERSNAP

The Five Dimensions of Strategic Career Choices

Every career is ultimately shaped by a series of decisions that make up a chronology of roles informed by the architecture of choices beneath them.

Having worked closely with professionals across industries and career stages, I’ve seen that the most resilient and meaningful trajectories aren’t built by accumulating positions. They’re sculpted by clarity: clarity about what matters, what aligns, and what can no longer be compromised.

Yet many career decisions still rely on surface metrics. Titles, compensation, organizational prestige. These markers are easy to track, but they rarely tell the full story. And they certainly don’t protect against regret.

What separates a strategic move from a reactive one is not the offer itself, but the lens through which it is assessed. In my experience, five dimensions matter far more than most professionals are encouraged to consider. They don’t show up on the offer letter but they determine everything that follows.

1. The Nature of Daily Work

Most job transitions begin with a sense of excitement. New possibilities. Fresh challenges. But this early lift fades quickly. What remains is the texture of your days: the meetings, the pace, the quality of thought required, the energy demanded and returned.

When I trace back the most regretted career moves I’ve seen, they often stemmed from a mismatch at this level. The work sounded right, looked right but it didn’t feel right once lived.

Satisfying work doesn’t just align with skills; it engages values, stretches capacity, and sustains interest over time. Strategic professionals learn to look past the role’s surface appeal and toward the rhythm it will establish in their lives.

2. The Human Ecosystem

Organizations are not structures; they’re systems, deeply human systems.

No matter how compelling the mission or the role, your experience will be shaped, day to day, by the people you work with and the culture they create. Growth, momentum, and resilience depend less on company vision than on interpersonal dynamics: trust, challenge, shared language, and psychological safety.

Some environments nourish ambition. Others quietly erode it. What distinguishes the two often isn’t visible from outside.

3. The Unwritten Rules

Beyond the formal job description lie the implicit codes that govern organizational life: who gets listened to, how decisions are made, what success actually looks like.

This informal layer — the rules beneath the rules — shapes influence, opportunity, and belonging. It’s not about gaming the system. It’s about understanding whether your way of working, leading, and contributing can thrive in the real dynamics of the organization.

Many talented professionals stall or burn out not for lack of skill. What happens is their instincts run counter to the local logic.

4. The Complete Value Exchange

Compensation matters. But it’s not the only thing that accrues value.

The most discerning professionals understand that each role offers a bundle of currencies: exposure, learning, flexibility, visibility, network, pace. Some of these are tangible. Others quietly compound over time.

Too narrow a focus on salary can obscure opportunities that offer greater long-term leverage or cost more than they first appear. Strategic choices require a broader view of what’s being gained, and what might be silently given up.

5. The Life Impact

Careers don’t happen in isolation. Every professional move reverberates through a life of relationships, routines, energy levels, and unspoken dreams.

I’ve seen too many promising roles unravel because they were out of sync with the broader life they entered. Transitions that succeed tend to occur within a supportive ecosystem where alignment exists. With work, of course, but also with what and whom the work is meant to support.

This isn’t a call for perfect balance. But it is a reminder that a career is a life structure. It has weight. It moves things.

Strategic Means Knowing Where You Stand

Few decisions offer perfect alignment across all five dimensions. But clarity around what matters and what cannot be compromised makes all the difference.

Strategy, in this context, isn’t about optimizing every angle. It’s about knowing which trade-offs serve your trajectory, and which ones quietly distort it.

The most intentional careers I’ve encountered weren’t assembled by accident or by algorithm. They were built through discernment, through decisions that reflected not just opportunity, but orientation.

That kind of clarity is difficult to find alone. But it’s what makes every move that follows more coherent.

 

From Framework to Focus: Personalized Career Strategy

The framework shared here is a starting point — not a prescription. Every career decision unfolds within a distinct context, shaped by your values, timing, and the particular constraints of your life.

If you’re navigating a significant transition or seeking to shape a more intentional trajectory, I offer personalized coaching to help apply these dimensions to your unique situation.

Together, we’ll clarify which trade-offs genuinely serve your broader vision — and which compromises might quietly erode it.

If that kind of clarity would support your next move, let’s talk.

The Math Behind Our Silence: What I learned about why we compromise at work

The only real negotiating power is the ability to walk away. I’ve seen it play out again and again: professionals weighing their next move, realizing their choices are already made for them.

Without a financial runway, choice is an illusion. The arithmetic of compromise shapes workplace decisions more than courage ever could.

Want to go deeper? A more comprehensive version of this essay is available on my blog: The Math Behind Our Silence: What I learned about why we compromise at work. There you’ll find additional insights on the structural forces shaping workplace integrity.

Athlete and scholar rejects identity crisis

Dedicated to students on athletic scholarships and their teachers.

Myron Rolle, a Florida State defensive back, deferred his National Football League ambition to pursue a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University, the makings of a nice story. It isn’t THE story.

That Rolle long ago recognized he isn’t defined by athletics, that he refused to allow a jersey or helmet to constrain self-awareness and personal esteem is what should really be saluted.

Rolle is an athlete, yes. A really good one. But there’s more than playing playmaker. Like being a son who recognizes that his parents sacrificed greatly when they left family in the Bahamas so the kids could have better. Like being the youngest of five brothers who credits his success to their friendship and guidance. Like being an academic and humanitarian. Like working to fulfill his goal of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon.

For Rolle, whom scouts project as a top 50 draft pick, good enough to make him a millionaire, football isn’t first on the to-do list. Never has been, which is remarkable when you consider that so many athletes let themselves be defined by the games they play.

via Bloomberg.com.

Update 201221: I am re-reading this 10+ years after and I can’t help but think about the Super Bowl winner -a medical doctor- who chose to opt out of the football season to care for his patients in times of covid-19. Respect.

 

Survey: Money not meaningful

About 62 percent of small-business employees think pay is better at larger companies (and 72 percent think benefits are better), but they stay at their jobs anyway, according to the survey of 474 employees at both large and small firms.

Small-company workers cite a better working environment as a reason to forgo a higher salary elsewhere.

Small companies have benefits that provide “meaningful value to employees,” says Jeffrey Blue, director of marketing for Salary.com. About 46 percent of those surveyed called work-life balance the biggest perk. Thirty-four percent cited loyalty to justify staying with a smaller company, while about 30 percent mentioned relationships with their boss or coworkers. Plus, small-business employees thought they had a better chance of getting ahead and eventually boosting their salary. (USNews.com)