You were promoted because you were exceptional at your job. You solved problems faster than anyone else. You executed flawlessly. You had the right answers. And now those very strengths are sabotaging your effectiveness as a leader. This is the paradox nobody warns you about: the behaviors that made you successful as an individual contributor often become toxic liabilities when you step into leadership. Yet organizations promote people based on technical excellence, then expect them to magically transform into coaches, strategists, and enablers.
This talk identifies the specific skills and instincts that become dangerous at a leadership level. The compulsion to solve every problem yourself rather than coaching others through solutions. The focus on your own output rather than multiplying the output of others. These are hard patterns to break because they're tied to your identity and what you've been rewarded for your entire career.
You'll explore the uncomfortable emotional territory of unlearning—the grief of letting go of behaviors that defined your success, the vulnerability of being a beginner again, and the patience required to develop entirely new muscle memory. This session offers a practical roadmap for the transformation from doer to enabler, with strategies for identifying which behaviors to abandon, how to replace them, and how to navigate the messy middle where you're not yet good at the new way but can't go back to the old.