Why High Performers Struggle As Leaders
You were great at your job, and that’s probably a big part of why you got promoted into leadership. It feels like recognition for everything you’ve accomplished and a natural next step. What nobody tells you when you get that promotion is that you’re stepping into a completely different job, and some of what made you great at the old one can make this new job a whole lot harder.
I know this one personally because I was a top performer before I became a leader. I had to learn that I couldn’t expect my team to be me, work the way I worked, or handle every client or deal exactly the way I would. My job had changed. I wasn’t there to jump in and solve every problem or prove I could still do the work. I needed to develop people who could think, make decisions, and succeed without me stepping in every time.
In this episode of The Real Work of Leadership, I’m talking about why that shift can be so difficult for high performers. I’m getting into what happens when you keep taking the work back because it’s faster, jumping in to save the deal, solving every problem your team brings you, or expecting people to do the work exactly the way you would. Leadership requires you to use the skills that got you there differently, because now your job is to build and develop the people around you.
0:30 – The hidden shift that happens when a high performer gets promoted into leadership
2:34 – When the strengths that made you a high performer become leadership gaps
4:26 – Why you can’t expect your team to work exactly the way you do
6:41 – Moving from providing all the answers to improving your team’s judgment
9:19 – Shifting your identity from personal results to collective results
10:30 – Burnout, delegation, and the difference between delegating and developing
14:06 – Letting your team struggle, make mistakes, and learn without jumping in to save them
15:09 – Holding people accountable while still leading with empathy
19:09 – Redefining leadership success around the decisions your team can make without you
21:44 – Developing people around where they actually want to grow
23:38 – Letting go of your old role and using the skills that got you there differently
26:00 – Why leadership is a long play and team success may not give you immediate validation
Mentioned In Why High Performers Struggle As Leaders
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Elisa Hawkins: Leadership theory is easy; leading actual people while you’re managing up, putting out fires, thinking strategically, and still trying to hit the number, is something else entirely. Hi, I’m Elisa Hawkins, and welcome to The Real Work of Leadership. We’re getting into the conversations, decisions, organizational dynamics, and real-life pressure that come with leading a team and being responsible for the results.
The promotion feels like recognition. You were great at your job, so now you get to lead the people doing the job. Yay, you’re promoted. But hidden inside that promotion is a completely different job. And nobody tells you that, the behaviors that made you exceptional, can become the very behaviors that hold your team back.
Welcome to The Real Work of Leadership today, y’all, we are talking about why high performers struggle as leaders. And this is something that I know very well, because I was a top performer, before I was promoted into leadership. And one of the things that I certainly struggle with, and I see this with so many new leaders, is you know, the strengths that made you a high performer, made us high performers, we move with speed. We have expertise, not only in the business that we’re in, but also in the businesses that we serve. So we become experts in our clients business and their industry. And we have exceptionally high standards for ourselves. So we want to win, at everything. We’re constantly developing ourselves to be better. And we measure ourselves to a very high standard.
With that is very strong personal ownership. We know that, we are the ones who need to hit that goal, or do that project, to the level of expertise and perfectionism that we hold, the standard we hold ourselves to. And our identity is tied to all of that. Our identity is tied to hitting that goal, exceeding it. Delivering on projects that we are so great at, that we have the expertise in. So our identity is tied to the ‘Atta Boys’. Tied to getting all of the awards and accolades, and commissions and bonuses, and all of those great things. And we are the ones that are accomplishing that. It’s our individual performance that brings us all of those things.
But those strengths can become leadership gaps. So it might mean that you’re taking work back, because it’s faster. You just, you know, it just needs to be done, and so you’re gonna take the work back so that it can be done appropriately and on time. Or, you know, if you’re a revenue leader you hop in on deals that your sales team is tanking on, right? So you hop on every call. Or, you hop on in the calls, or in the client meetings before the deal goes south. So you’re closing, all of the things. Your team depends on you to come in, be a part of it. You're solving every problem. So your team is coming to you with problems that they need you to solve, when in actuality a lot of those problems could mean that they can solve themselves.
And high performers also have a high expectation, well they have a high expectation of themselves, they also have a extremely high expectation of their team. Like, it's the expecting people to do the work exactly as you did it. To lead a call, or lead a client meeting exactly how you would. And that's confusing your standards, or our standards, with the only acceptable method. And you're measuring, or we are measuring value, right, by how needed we are. ‘Cause remember, we’re used to being the ones that get the job done, that hit the goal, that exceed the goal, that we’re the ones that the company can depend on, every single month to do what we say we’re gonna do and what we’re tasked with doing.
But here’s the thing. Me coming from a top performer, and you might’ve heard me talk about this on another podcast, or maybe several of them, ‘cause I’m pretty passionate about this. You can’t expect people to be you. You can’t expect them to work the way that you work. You can’t expect them to, to close every deal, or to close it the way that you would. Everybody has their own individual strengths. And they have their own individual way of performing, and getting the job done. And you’ve heard me talk about a counterpart of mine when I was in my first leadership role, telling me “Elisa, you can’t expect your team to be you. They’re not you.” And that really resonated with me, and I really thought about that a lot, and thought deeply about it. And that really shaped how I approached my team, after she gave me that pivotal piece of advice. And it’s something that I say to everyone, that I coach everyone on, really pay it forward, and give that same piece of advice because that is very true. You have to understand your team's individual talents. And you need to make the identity shift from being what you used to be, which is an individual contributor, top performer, you’re an expert. Now you need to build. So you need to build strategy, you need to build your team. You need to build the individuals on your team, you need to help them build their expertise. And what they’re great at. You need to be the builder now, not just the expert that everybody comes to. That means you’re gonna go from doing the actual work, to developing others to do that work, at scale.
So, if you. Let’s think about that, right? So if you were developing each of your team members in the way in which they need to be developed. Leaning in to their talents, leaning in to what they’re good at. And, coaching them through the areas where they can use some development on. Those are critical, critical pieces of being a leader.
You’re gonna go from providing all the answers, to improving judgement. When I lead teams, they would come to me with problems. And, I would ask them a set of three questions: “Why is it a problem? How is it a problem? And what is your potential solution?” And the team loved that. Instead of them coming to me with every problem, they would come, start coming to me with problems that, hey, it might be out of their wheelhouse or, you know, above their paygrade if you will, to solve it, so they needed my input, so I would ask them what their proposed solution was. After they, we talked through what the problem is. A lot of times, it wasn’t really a problem that we needed to solve for. Sometimes it was, and sometimes I would take their solutions. I would think about it, we would hash different things out, we would get other people's feedback, and other people’s proposed solution, and come together. And we would decide on what the best solution to move forward would be, to solve the problem. And this is critical, because it gets people to think through, instead of just in a react mode, and responding to every problem, they started thinking about if it really was a problem. Or hey, it might be sometimes that they just needed to come and vent. Like, “Elisa, I know we can’t solve this, but I just need to let you know what I’m feeling, why I’m feeling it, and this may or may not be a solution, or it may or may not be something we need to solve for.” Sometimes your team just needs to vent.
So working with them, and communicating with them on helping them to think critically about a potential problem is an absolute key in leadership. ‘Cause it develops them. It develops them to think about things instead of a hair-on-fire, problem A through Z, to really start thinking and prioritizing “Hey, this really isn’t a problem.” And “Hey, it might be a problem down the line, it’s not a problem right now. We can hash this out later.” Or “Hey it really is a problem, and hey, this particular thing isn’t performing well for our customers, we need to improve this.” Well that’s definitely something that we should talk about improving and offer up solutions to the organization writ large, to help improve. But you don’t know that unless it, unless you’re having those meaningful conversations and asking those questions and not trying to solve everything all at once.
And I think one of the biggest things in shifting identities, is going from personal results to collective results. So I was just speaking about, you’re used to the one that’s getting the accolades. Getting the ‘Atta Boy’s, you know, winning the prizes, winning the presidents club trip or what-have-you, right? You’re used to being the one that is pretty much getting the glory, and now you’re responsible for giving that. ‘Cause it’s no longer about you, it's about your team. And sometimes that can be a hard shift for new leaders, especially top performers can be a struggle to do that. You’ve been operating in “I” for so long, that now it’s the we. It’s the collective. Right? And so now what you need to do, is now, give those accolades to your team. When your team members have hit goal, or they’ve done a phenomenal job, it’s up to you, and it’s your responsibility to celebrate that, to celebrate those wins. And sometimes that can be a little bit of a difficult shift.
You’ve also, one of the things that I see leaders, and I know myself specifically ran into this, is the old fashioned burnout. Because, if we’re not delegating, certain tasks, certain things, you know, then we are doing all of the work. If we are the ones who are closing all the deals hey we have to do all of the coaching we have to do everything but we’re running twelve hours a day with very little room to strategize, with very little room to pause, reflect, and maybe even go out for a walk. I can’t tell you how many times I was on back-to-back zoom calls from 8 am to 8 pm sometimes, right? And then you have a whole host of work that you have to do from the calls that you were just on. So. You’ve got to learn to delegate, but you also need to distinguish the delegation from development.
So delegation without development. I want you to think about this, is simply task distribution. So your team is tasked with running sales motions. Being on with prospects, being on with customers. And that is bringing in revenue for the organization. So if we’re gonna delegate something to our team, let's make sure that we’re also developing them. And, that it is going to develop them in the role that they are currently in, or maybe a role that they are trying to develop themselves for in the future. So helping them to develop throughout whatever project delegation we’re doing, or tasks that we’re doing, is the best way.
You know, one of the things that I did with one of my teams is I felt the team calls were getting a little, getting a little stale. It didn’t need to be Elisa droning on and on, and “Hey we’re talking about. You know hey, we did this last week, we did this last month, and hey, rah rah rah.” Or “Hey y’all we missed goal, so we’ve got to, we’ve really gotta step it up. To, we’ve not only gotta hit goal this month, we have to make up for our missed goal last month.” And then it would be a development. We would have enablement on to talk about certain things. Or other teams from say, customer success or marketing or what have you come and join the calls. But I was getting feedback from the team, that they would like to see this. That they would like to see that. There were different topics that they really wanted to discuss, and I loved that. So what I started doing, is every month one member of the team was gonna run the team call. Along with their team members. They were gonna pick the topic, they were gonna invite guests. And that gave them ownership. Not only ownership of the meeting, but also they could see what preparation goes into, for preparing for those types of calls. So, it was a phenomenal way, the team loved it. Sometimes not so much, and I would have people be the first to raise their hands, and then I would have other teams that were like “Nope nope nope, we’re not doing that.”So.
That’s just one example of, and it took time off my plate, too because there was one week of the month that I wasn’t prepping content and prepping decks, or prepping guests to come on, so that freed up some of my time, which is great. But that’s just a small example of different things that really gets your team engaged, but can also give them development, in what that, in what preparing for things like that would look like. And coaching requires allowing someone to think. To struggle. And sometimes do the work differently. This is something that so many leaders that I coach, that I have led, struggle with. Because when I tell them that they have to let their team, AE or whoever it is, fail on a call they give me horrified looks. Because they’re like “There is no way in hell I’m gonna, you know, tank this deal.” And again, I’m not advocating to tank a, to tank a, you know, a huge deal or a, but you need to let them fail. And not jump in and save them every time. Because they’re never gonna develop, they’re never gonna learn, if they are not able to learn from the mistakes. Because learning from those is what is gonna develop them professionally. It’s gonna develop them to where they won’t make that mistake again. And they’ll do it differently. And that can’t happen if we are constantly jumping in, to, to save them.
This is something that I think gets confused, a lot, is accountability with empathy. What do I mean by that? I took over a team that was struggling. Very much so. 50% of the team were on performance improvement plans. And, I took the team over, and we paved a new path forward. And some would think that a PIP is accountability. It can be, if it’s done correctly, but I would also argue that the PIP should never be in place because we should have done a whole heck of a lot of coaching, and communicating, before we actually put them in a PIP. At the end of it, 3 out of the 4 people that were on PIPs successfully completed them. Thank goodness. One, unfortunately, did not. Now, those are actually really good odds. Because studies have shown that as those PIPs come in to place, it’s technically too far gone. And you can have accountability with empathy. I’m gonna give you an example.
I had noticed one of our top performers on the team, she was not on a PIP, but I had noticed her struggling. She would overachieve on goal one month, and then absolutely tank the next month. And it would go up and down, and up and down, and up and down. And in one of our coaching, in one of our one-on-ones I asked her, you know, “I’m seeing this trend with you, and I wanna understand what exactly is happening. Because you are a top performer, until this particular time, you have been performing, steadily hitting goal or exceeding goal month, after month, after month. But over the last couple of months I’ve seen you struggle, and you, you’ll have a really high week and a really low week, a really high week, then a really low week. Talk to me about what's going on?” And through that open dialog and conversation, and handling it in a human and empathetic way. I came to understand that she was having health challenges. She didn’t want to talk to me about that. She didn’t want to come to me on her own. Because of this health issue she had to be out on short term leave, before I took over the team, and she was scared that coming to me with this would put her, and her role, in jeopardy. So once she opened up to me about that, now I understood, she is struggling. The first thing I said to her was this is not going to put your role in jeopardy, at all. What this is gonna do is, help me help you. So when she’s struggling and when she needs to be out, she could be out and she could absolutely raise her hand to me, and come to me and talk to me about it. And I would help support her, and guide her through that. She was able to go to doctors and get treatment that helped resolve her health issue finally, thank goodness. And she was able to do it without the stress, of that I’m gonna be breathing down her neck. And that was supremely important in her journey to recover, and to get her health back. And also too, get her professional wins back. And get her professional trajectory back to where she wanted it to be, ‘cause she wanted to be that top performer.
So we can have accountability conversations, and even sometimes tough conversations, but do it in an empathetic way. We can redefine, kind of, what that visible success looks like. Like, as leaders better decisions are made without you, right? So if you are having your team think through problems that they’re seeing, or “Hey, we’re seeing trends, our customers are talking about this.” And they're developing their own decisions, or their own solutions, then that means they’re going to have better decision making skills on their own. And that is the absolute best thing that we can do as leaders.
An example of this would be, sales people are very territorial, right? And so I would have a couple of different sellers that would, you know, constantly fight over accounts. And so, I kinda got tired of being the referee between these sellers. And so I brought them on a call, and I said “Y’all are gonna hash it out, without me. And if I have to get involved, then probably both of you, or at least one of you, are maybe not gonna like the decision that I make on this. So I’d prefer for y’all to work this out together, and figure out a path forward, whether that looks like working it together, and splitting the revenue recognition.” Or whether it is “No, this person really does have the best relationship with this prospect, or is the one that was actually able to get them on a call or get the meeting with them, so I’m gonna just let them run with it because, honestly I was never able to do that.” Right? So it became a point where they started hashing things out, and would only come to me, if they absolutely were not able to have a resolution on it. Which was great, because then they started resolving, and hey, it made them better professionals, because now they were having to navigate their own issues, their own fights if you will, but they were resolving it in a professional way, and it was giving them leadership experience too, right? Because if you are constantly jumping in to be a referee for your team, they’re not going to develop themselves, as what they could potentially be as great leaders, and resolve issues within the team. You wanna make sure that those people that are on your team, that have a vision for themselves in leadership, or maybe with bigger responsibilities in their own role, or maybe they wanna move to another team and develop themselves there. We want our people growing.
Because, as I say to leaders all the time, if we aren’t developing our people, then they are gonna leave and they are gonna be developed somewhere else. One of our number one goals as leaders is to consistently make sure we’re developing our people, in where they want to be developed. It could be that they want, that they don’t have any designs on leadership, they just want to be the top sales professional in their field. As a matter of fact, I know a lot of individual contributors, a lot of top professionals, absolutely want to stay exactly where they’re at. They love doing what they’re doing. They do not want the responsibility of a team, but they do want to develop themselves in many different areas to become better sales professionals. Because the top sales professionals, I guarantee you, are always developing themselves. To grow either into a larger responsibility like maybe they’re in mid market, and they want to be in enterprise sales, right?
So, if you are a leader that is scared-to-death of every time you go on vacation, hey, you need to go and refresh and reset. Everybody needs to do that, you need to go on trips with your family or your loved one, or hey, you might wanna do a solo trip, right? Everybody needs to reset and refresh. And, if you are scared every time you do that, if you're scared that your team is not gonna perform, that sales are gonna tank, then you are not developing your team. Because if they are, I guess, what’s the old adage “The mice will play while the cats are away.” If you will. If you’re not developing your team where they are consistently performing while you’re not there, then you don’t need to be scared when you go on vacation. You know that when you come back, things are not gonna be on fire and the goals are not being met, right? So that is something you need to really also think about. It feels like letting go, when you make this move into leadership, and it really is. You're only letting go of your previous role and the skills that it took to get you there. And it’s not to say that you won’t use a lot of those skills in your new role, you will, but you will use them differently. And coaching feels slower, so a lot of the difficulty comes in a lot of the coaching feels slower than doing, and it is. But I'm gonna tell you, the moment that your teams, when they get the light bulb moment, that is everything. That is what I absolutely look for. And I absolutely love when they get the lightbulb moment. And also understand, that you can coach 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but it is ultimately up to them to action-out on, and their success and actioning-out on it and the improvements they see from the coaching that they received, is their success. Not ours. I always say that. It’s the work that they put in, to do it. Because there’s going to be team members that don’t put in that work.
You can always teach a skill, you can never teach will. I really want everybody to also understand that. If someone’s not picking it up because they’re not actioning-out on it, then that is another conversation to have. But you need to celebrate the people that do and celebrate their success. I often have people come to me that I’ve coached, and like “Elisa, it’s all because of you.” And I correct that immediately, it is absolutely not because of me. It’s because of them. They took the action out, they didn’t have to do that. They chose to do that. They chose to do uncomfortable things. And because they chose to do that, because they chose to action-out on it, because they chose to get uncomfortable, they grew professionally, they grew in their revenue, they grew, they were hitting goals, they closed a big client, whatever that looked like for them. They did that. I just was along the way to help. And I love that.
Sometimes team success may not always provide the immediate validation, it’s very true. But leadership is a long play. Y’all. And I’m telling you when you see, you know, you might’ve inherited a mess, you know? You might have, like hey, like me, you might have like me inherited a team that 50% of ‘em were on PIPs, and the team hadn’t hit revenue targets, they were at 52% was their high point, and they hadn’t hit revenue targets in over a year. Those are challenging, and it takes a lot of hard work, takes a lot of leaning in, and it takes a whole heck of a lot of coaching, but you will eventually see the team's success, and know that you played a part in it.
One closing thing that I have for you, is just to think about, that your job is no longer to prove that you are the most capable person in the room. It is to build a room full of extremely capable people.
All right y’all. If you really, really loved this please action-out on it. Have a great one.
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