Have you ever promoted your best performer into a leadership role and then watched the very thing that made them great start driving good people out the door?
I worked with an architecture firm going through a leadership transition. The founder was retiring after three decades, and the plan was to hand the firm to Kyle, his second in command and the firm’s lead architect. For most of his career, that choice would have surprised no one. Kyle was the person clients asked for by name. Give him a project and leave him alone, and he’d deliver something better than anyone expected. Kyle built his reputation almost entirely on his own output, his own judgment, his own relationship with the client sitting across the table.
The trouble started when the job changed under him. Running the firm meant he was no longer just responsible for his own work, he was responsible for everyone else’s too. And every time something went sideways on someone else’s project, whether it was a missed deadline, a subcontractor issue, or a junior architect making a call he wouldn’t have made, it pulled his attention away from the thing he actually cared about: serving his own clients well. That’s when the short fuse showed up. Kyle would lash out in project meetings. He’d snap at the office manager, who was trying to keep the operational side running so he could focus on the work. In his mind, none of this was a problem worth examining. Every interruption felt like a distraction from doing his job, and he believed others just weren’t as capable as he was.
His perception wasn’t reality. It rarely is.
The Signs Were Everywhere
By the time Kyle started coaching with me, the signs were everywhere except where he could see them. Good people were quietly checking out. Ideas stopped coming up in meetings because nobody wanted to be the one who suggested something he’d shoot down. The office manager, who kept the whole place running, was exhausted and starting to look for other jobs.
We started with something simple: the Johari Window, a matrix that maps what you do and don’t know about yourself against what others do and don’t know about you. There’s a quadrant for the stuff everyone else sees clearly that you can’t see at all – your blind spots. We all have them. Once Kyle grasped the concept, the harder part began, actually asking for feedback and sitting with it.
It wasn’t gentle. People told Kyle he came across as an uncaring jerk. That they didn’t matter to him. That he didn’t listen. That he treated other people’s frustration as an inconvenience to his own workday. That’s a hard thing to hear about yourself, especially when you’ve spent your whole career being right about the work. To his credit, he didn’t argue with it. He let it land.
As we worked through the feedback, something older began to surface. In his early years, Kyle had come to believe that being capable meant having the right answer, solving problems on his own, and avoiding mistakes. Over time, that limiting belief became part of his identity: if he did not have everything figured out, others might think less of him.
That mindset helped him succeed as an individual contributor, but it created distance once he stepped into a leadership role. Asking for help felt like weakness. Delegating felt risky. Other people’s mistakes felt like a reflection of his own ability. What had once driven his performance was now making it harder for others to work with him.
That was Kyle’s epiphany. Once he could see that his short fuse was never really about the office manager or the junior architect, that it was a fixed belief formed decades earlier about what it took to be worth something, he had a choice in front of him. He could keep defending a version of himself built in grade school, or he could start choosing to show up in a way that built trust, cooperation, and real connection instead of distance.
Kyle’s epiphany went even deeper. He realized that underneath his fixed belief was a deep fear: that if he did not have the answer, he might not be seen as smart enough or capable enough to lead. Always having the right answer had become his armor.
Kyle’s transformation did not come from learning a new leadership technique. It came from realizing that his value was not dependent on solving every problem or proving himself to everyone in the building. Once that began to land, he could spend less energy protecting his image and more energy building trust with the people around him.
Setting Out On A New Path
From there, the change was gradual but real. He started listening before reacting. He got more transparent about what he actually needed from people instead of expecting them to read his mood. He learned to delegate instead of hovering over everyone’s shoulder waiting to catch the mistake he was sure was coming. It didn’t happen overnight, but none of it made him a different person. It simply made him a more aware version of himself.
The office noticed before he did. People started bringing up ideas in meetings again. The office manager stopped looking for the exit. The tension that used to walk in the door with him in the morning wasn’t there anymore. A year later, the firm wasn’t just functioning under new leadership, it was a place people were genuinely glad to show up each day.
Here’s the pattern I see over and over with technical experts stepping into leadership. The skills that made them indispensable as individual performers: speed, precision, an intolerance for sloppy work. These are not the same skills that make people want to follow them, and nobody hands you a manual for that transition. Most leaders find out they have a blind spot the same way Kyle did, by having it pointed out directly, usually after it’s already cost them something.
The good news is that blind spots are the most fixable problem in leadership, because the fix doesn’t require becoming someone new. It just requires being willing to hear what everyone else can already see, and sometimes, tracing it back far enough to see where the belief came from in the first place.
So if you’ve promoted your best individual performer and you’re wondering why the team around them feels smaller than it used to, ask yourself what feedback they’ve actually received, and whether anyone has ever told them the truth about how it feels to work for them.
