Boss, is this the right direction?

I came across a story from a new manager who, when a team member asked exactly that, wanted to scream inside: 'I don't know either, and I'm terrified.' As an individual contributor, this person delivered—did the work without being told, racked up strong results. That track record earned a promotion to team lead. And then, the moment the title landed, the ability seemed to evaporate. Before, doing your own job well was enough. Now several people are looking to you for answers—so what are you supposed to do?

The Kind of Busy Has to Change

The first trap new leaders fall into is mistaking busyness for a reason to exist. A team member asks for help, and they jump in to solve it themselves. Feedback, schedule checks, even the busywork—if it doesn't pass through their own hands, the anxiety keeps them up at night. One team lead told me they hadn't taken a single day off in the past year.

In the moment, it feels busy and productive, like you're contributing. But the feedback coming from above says the exact opposite: 'You're not playing the role of a leader.' A leader's busyness isn't spent doing the hands-on work for others. It's setting a clear goal and getting the team to run toward it. That is what a leader should be busy with.

One senior leader who spent years in Silicon Valley said that after going through this shift, they began spending 40 percent of their time meeting people. Every lunch, they'd invite a promising candidate to the company and share a meal. By the time you start looking for people once you need them, it's already too late. Building those relationships in advance—that's the area where a leader should be busy.

If You Can't Hire People Smarter Than You

Since hiring came up, let me flag one more thing. The second trap new leaders fall into is the delusion that 'I have to know more, technically, than the people on my team.' Only then can I give advice, only then will my team look up to me—so they study. They study the technical craft.

The problem this delusion creates is structural. You can't bring yourself to hire people smarter than you. So the team's talent density drops. When talent density is low, you become the person who knows the most, and every question comes to you. You end up in a situation where you have to solve every problem yourself. A vicious cycle.

It's easy to think, well, I'll just hire someone with enough experience and it'll be fine. But a person who is expensive to persuade every time the direction changes ends up being no help in the end. Capability alone isn't the thing to look at. An attitude that doesn't fear change, a disposition that approaches things positively—in a fast-moving environment, that mindset often matters more than experience.

When Your Formula for Success Turns Toxic

The third trap is getting locked into the formula that used to bring success. The very approach that served you well as an individual contributor—solving problems yourself, delivering results fast, proving your worth through personal skill—actually wrecks the team once you become a leader.

You have to accept that the rules of the game have changed. If you solve every problem for them, your team members never grow. If they don't grow, the team's overall capability doesn't rise. If the team's capability doesn't rise, more problems pile onto you. This, too, is a vicious cycle.

There are problems you can solve for them, and there are problems your team needs to struggle through and resolve on their own. Fail to tell the two apart, and in the end the leader becomes the team's bottleneck. As one person put it precisely: 'I thought my team being unable to breathe without me was proof of my ability—when really it was the rope tightening around my own neck.'

Put Off the Hard Words and You'll Pay More Later

The fourth, and most practical, trap: when feedback is called for, dragging your feet on the grounds that you 'need to nail down objective evidence' first.

On the surface it looks reasonable—you want to speak from facts, not emotion. But here's how it plays out in reality. While you're gathering evidence, you quietly come to see the person worse and worse. The resentment deepens. At some point the pent-up emotion erupts. And the feedback you give in that moment isn't feedback anymore—it's an attack.

Perfect evidence that everyone can accept does not exist. One person judging another is inevitably subjective. What matters is surfacing your own judgment early. Not declaring 'Your direction is wrong,' but asking, with genuine curiosity, 'Why did you make it this way?' A conversation comes before a correction.

One of a leader's responsibilities is to never blindside their people. If a performance review is the first time someone hears a piece of feedback, that's not the team member's failing—it's the leader who never spoke up along the way. Putting off discomfort isn't kindness. It's avoidance.

Leadership Isn't a Talent—It's a Skill

Beneath all of these mistakes lies a single delusion: the belief that leadership belongs to the realm of talent. 'I just don't have that gift.' 'If I set down the technical work and move into leadership, my career gets shaky.' Thoughts like these hold people back.

Leadership is a skill that requires practice. No one is good at it from the start. If someone has asked whether you'd consider taking on a leadership role, that itself means you're the most fitting person for it right now.

The longer a career runs, the more someone who relies only on individual skill is competing against younger people. Whether it's coding or design, when you compete on personal ability alone, age works against you. Influence, on the other hand—the way your presence raises the capability of the people around you—only grows as experience accumulates. And that influence begins with a good reputation. With becoming someone people want to work with again. Early in a career, you carry a résumé around hunting for opportunities; later in a career, people bring the opportunities to you. The turning point is the experience of leading.

The regrets that come with age are, for the most part, not regrets about the things we did. They're regrets about the things we never tried.