Taking on a Leadership Role
A Shift in Mindsert, Not Just in Title
Many of us perceive the move from being an Individual Contributor (IC) to assuming a leadership role as a natural, almost inevitable progression in our careers. It’s often framed as a promotion, a reward for technical excellence or consistent delivery. However, this mental model—treating leadership as the “next step”—is misleading and, in many cases, sets up both the new leader and their team for failure. Leadership is not a linear upgrade; it is a fundamental transformation in how you think, act, and define success.
From Execution to Coordination
As an experienced IC, your work tends to be scoped—maybe not always well-defined, but at least bound by the logic of your craft. You write code, design systems, analyze data, solve problems. Even in ambiguity, there’s a sense of rhythm: you know what good looks like, and you’re responsible for getting there.
The accountability for your deliverables sits with you. It is you who is in control. You can put your headphones on, focus, and drive value. Your identity is tightly coupled with what you produce.
Now contrast that with the role of a Team Lead or Manager. Your success is no longer directly tied to what you create, but to what your team enables, delivers, and becomes. You don’t control the output the same way. The luxury of jumping in to “just fix it” does not exist. Yet, you’re still accountable, but you’re not the one doing the work. Leadership demands you let go of execution and start influencing direction and cohesion instead.
The Fog of Leadership
As a manager, you’re often working toward goals that are fuzzy, shifting, or politically influenced. It is possible that you are tasked with delivering outcomes that are not well-scoped—or even fully understood—by your own superiors. You’ll face a reality where strategy is iterative, and clarity only emerges through experimentation, feedback, and lots of conversations.
To use a metaphor:
As an IC, it’s like hiking a trail with a map and compass.
As a leader, it’s like navigating a dense fog, with only a vague sense of destination and a team of people following behind—each with different levels of motivation, skill, and trust in the journey.
Your tools are no longer IDEs, models, or spreadsheets—they’re conversations, decisions, trade-offs, and trust. The challenge becomes psychological, emotional, and organizational.
The Manager’s Paradox
You are accountable for output, yet discouraged from producing it directly. The expectation is to protect your team from disruption, while simultaneously transmitting urgency and expectation from leadership. Basically, you must act as a shock absorber from above and a motivator from below.
The responsibility to grow people is also yours—not only through mentoring and feedback but by letting them fail, struggle, and stretch—even if it means things take longer or quality dips temporarily. That’s often one of the hardest parts of leadership for high-performing ICs to embrace: you can’t rescue the work without weakening the team.
A New Definition of Success
The emotional shift is enormous. In your IC role, completing a task, shipping a feature, or solving a problem brings immediate satisfaction. As a leader, the gratification is delayed, indirect, and often invisible. The greatest contributions you make may be conversations no one else witnesses, decisions that prevent a future fire, or a culture of trust that quietly enables others to shine.
You start to see success not in what you do, but in what happens because of you.
Leadership Is a Change of Work, Not a Step Up
It’s essential to reframe leadership not as a vertical climb, but as a horizontal pivot. It’s not “more” of what you’ve done—it’s something different altogether. A career in leadership is not the inevitable next step; it’s a career in a new domain. It comes with its own craft, disciplines, and fulfillment—but it’s not for everyone.
Some of the best ICs choose to remain as such—and thrive in doing so. And that should be not only accepted but celebrated.
Final Word
So before you move into a leadership role—or if you’re already in one and wondering why it feels so disorienting—recognize that it’s not just a new job title. It’s a new identity, a new craft, and a new kind of responsibility. Done well, it can be one of the most rewarding experiences of your career—not because you’ll produce more, but because you’ll enable more than you ever could alone.
I will write more on how to navigate the path as a new leader.
