What got you here won’t get you there: moving from high performer to high-impact leader
Most of us if not all of us have heard the saying: “What got you here won’t get you there.”
It’s often rolled out in leadership seminars or strategy offsites, but it’s never more relevant than in the first leadership step from high performing individual contributor to leader of a team.
It’s a jump that can surprise even the most successful professionals.
Imagine, you’ve built your career on being the go-to person, the one who could deliver at speed, fix the toughest problems, and consistently exceed expectations. That’s what earned you the promotion.
And yet… the very habits that made you indispensable at one level can quietly hold you back at the next.
The Trap of the “Super Doer”
In your early career, success often means knowing the answer and doing the work. The more complex the task, the more you leaned in, rolled up your sleeves, and delivered. You were rewarded for expertise, output and precision.
But leadership at scale?
It’s not about being the one who solves the problem.
It’s about building the conditions where problems get solved without you.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If you keep playing the role of “hero contributor” you’ll bottleneck your team. Instead of scaling your impact, you’ll become the ceiling.
The Mindset Shift This first leadership transition, at Career Pivots we call this Level 1: Leader of a Team success is about letting go of being the star performer and becoming the coach, and an enabler. What this requires:
- Delegation as development – seeing delegation not as offloading work, but as a deliberate act to grow capability in others.
- Redefining success – shifting your pride from “I did it” to “They did it.”
- Tolerating imperfection – allowing space for your team to try, learn and improve, even if it’s not exactly how you would have done it.
- Focusing on outcomes, not methods – guiding what needs to be achieved, but leaving room for your team to figure out how to do it.
This can be hard!
For many high performers, identity can be tied to competence. Letting go of direct control can therefore feel risky or even threatening.
However, if you don’t make the shift, your leadership will always be limited to the number of hours you can personally work.
For those who like data, think of it like this: As an individual contributor, your success was addition — you added your output to the organisation.
As a leader, your success is multiplication — your role is to multiply the capability of others so that together, you achieve exponentially more.
The career path to leadership is not just about adding skills; it’s about changing mindsets that no longer serve you.
Thinking about traditional hierarchies, at each new level we need to ask different questions:
- Leader of a Team: How do I help my team succeed?
- Leader of Leaders: How do I help my leaders lead?
- Functional/Group Leader: How do I align my function with strategy?
- Executive Leader: How do I lead for the enterprise?
- CEO: How do I shape the organisation’s future?
Your challenge is to know when to rewrite your own rulebook because what got you here really won’t get you there.