Why Great Engineers Can Fail When They Become Leaders

Moving from technical expertise to leadership is not a natural promotion, it is a complete identity shift. What really changes and how to make the transition work.

There is a strange turning point that happens in many careers.

One day, you are known for your ability to fix problems, to write code that others admire, to design systems that rarely fail. Then, almost without warning, you are promoted. The title changes, the responsibilities expand, and suddenly the same company that once celebrated your technical skill is asking you to lead people instead of solving problems yourself.

On paper, it feels like a reward, maybe even the natural next step.

But the reality is more unsettling.

It is as if you have been dropped into a country where the language sounds familiar, but you cannot quite speak it. The instincts that carried you for years begin to betray you.

The very habits that once proved your worth start getting in the way.

If you have lived through this, you know how disorienting it can be. The technical brilliance that once set you apart no longer matters as much.

Nobody is impressed that you still know how to debug faster than anyone else, because the expectation has shifted. What they want now is for you to help others succeed at it. And here is the difficult part: there is no guidebook.

You wake up one morning and realize the skills that made you valuable are no longer the skills that will keep you valuable.

This is not the smooth arc of growth that people like to describe, the kind where maturity just arrives with time. Most of us stumble. Some never make the shift. Many spend years caught in between, doing too much themselves when they should step back, or withdrawing too far when their team still needs them close.

The technical-to-leadership transition is not a matter of learning to sound confident in meetings or completing a management course.

It is a deeper change, almost an identity rewrite.

It forces you to ask yourself what success really means when your hands no longer touch the work, and whether you are ready to measure your worth in the progress of others rather than the output of your own.

Why the Best Technicians Often Struggle as Leaders

Think of the star engineer who built their reputation on being the fastest problem solver. When a production issue hit, they were the first to go into logs, trace the bug, and fix it.

Their confidence came from knowing they could always find an answer. Now, as a manager, they no longer get the same satisfaction.

Problems still exist, but their job is not to fix them. It is to make sure others are enabled to do it. The instinct to jump in becomes a liability.

Each time they do it, they take away learning opportunities from their team and reinforce the belief that the leader is the only one who can handle the hardest problems.

The paradox is cruel. The very skills that got you promoted can sabotage your effectiveness in the new role.

Perfectionism turns into micromanagement. Technical brilliance turns into arrogance. Speed turns into impatience.

The system shifts under your feet, and unless you adapt, you risk being that frustrated leader who neither codes well anymore nor leads effectively.

From Output to Outcomes

One of the clearest shifts is in how success is measured.

A technical expert is judged by their output: the quality of code, the accuracy of analysis, and the reliability of a system. These are visible and often quantifiable.

But a leader is judged by outcomes, and outcomes are messy. How well does the team deliver as a whole? How motivated are people to stay? How aligned is the work with the company’s strategy? These are questions that have no simple unit of measurement. You cannot write a line of code or configure a system to solve them.

Consider football. A player is praised for scoring goals or making assists. A coach, however, may never touch the ball but is judged by the team’s ability to play together, adapt strategy, and win over a season.

A brilliant player who becomes a coach often struggles because they still want to play, forgetting that their contribution now comes from orchestrating the whole field, not running with the ball themselves.

Just a few good football players become good coaches late in their careers, like Renato Portaluppi did.

What Really Changes

To make this shift practical, it helps to see the fundamental changes that mark the technical-to-leadership transition:

• From solving problems to defining which problems matter: Engineers thrive on elegant solutions. Leaders spend more time deciding which problems are worth solving at all. This requires judgment, prioritization, and sometimes saying no to technically interesting challenges that add little value.

• From being right to making others right: In technical work, being right is currency. In leadership, what matters is how often you enable others to be right. Your credibility comes from how you help others build confidence in their reasoning.

• From personal skill to collective trust: Technical mastery is individual. Leadership is relational. People will follow you not because you are the smartest but because they trust you to support them, protect them when necessary, and give credit rather than take it.

• From efficiency to effectiveness: Engineers optimize for speed and efficiency. Leaders must optimize for effectiveness, which sometimes means allowing slower paths if they build long-term resilience, team growth, or strategic alignment.

• From certainty to ambiguity. Technical questions often have correct answers. Leadership questions rarely do. These are not problems to solve but dilemmas to manage.

Common Pitfalls of New Leaders

The failures repeat with surprising regularity:

• Micromanagement disguised as help: The new leader still wants to “save the day,” rewriting code at night or taking over design sessions. They justify it as helping, but the team sees it as a lack of trust.

• Overvaluing technical expertise: Some leaders cling to the idea that their worth comes from knowing more than everyone else. Leadership is not about winning technical debates. It is about creating conditions for others to contribute.

• Neglecting politics: Engineers often disdain organizational politics. Leaders cannot. Influence, negotiation, and stakeholder management are part of the job. Ignoring them is like refusing to use half the tools available.

• Avoiding difficult conversations: Technical problems can be solved with logic. Human problems require courage. Performance feedback, conflicts, and misaligned expectations are unavoidable. Leaders who avoid them end up with teams that decay quietly.

What Works in Practice

Abstract principles are not enough. In practice, what works looks like this:

One-on-one conversations as your new debugging

Instead of debugging code, you debug motivations, frustrations, and aspirations. A weekly one-on-one where you listen more than you talk is worth more than any dashboard.

Clear principles instead of rigid rules

Teams need to understand the boundaries within which they can act. Principles like “prefer clarity over speed” or “assume positive intent” provide guidance without micromanagement.

Asking questions more than giving answers

When a team member asks what to do, resist the urge to prescribe. Ask questions that help them reason. It is slower in the short term but builds capacity over time.

Building cross-functional trust

Your influence now extends beyond your team. Relationships with product managers, designers, and other leaders are as important as your technical knowledge. Treat these as alliances, not transactions.

Measuring what matters

Instead of obsessing over velocity or bug counts, look at indicators of team health and value delivered. Retention rates, psychological safety, and stakeholder satisfaction are not as clean as technical metrics, but they tell you more about long-term success.

The Loneliness of Leadership

One reality rarely discussed is how isolating leadership can be.

As a technical contributor, you often had peers who shared your struggles. As a leader, fewer people can relate. You carry information you cannot always share.

You make decisions that others may criticize without understanding the context. And you may discover that the feedback you once received so easily is now filtered, because people hesitate to be honest with their boss.

This loneliness is not a reason to avoid leadership, but it requires preparation.

You need your own support system, whether peers in other teams, mentors, or even communities outside the company.

Pretending that leadership is just another technical challenge to master leaves you unprepared for the emotional and relational demands that come with it.

History offers some vivid analogies. Many brilliant soldiers failed as generals because they could not stop fighting at the front lines. Their tactical skills were extraordinary, but strategy required distance.

The same pattern repeats in business. A founder who builds a product with skill often struggles to run a growing company, because the work becomes about financing, hiring, and culture, not coding.

The transition is not a betrayal of past skills but an expansion into a new domain. Those who cannot accept the expansion often stall their own organizations.

Closing Reflection

How do you know if you are really valuable at work? For years, I measured mine by the tasks I completed, the problems I solved, the hours I stayed late fixing what was broken. That kind of work leaves little doubt. You see the result right in front of you, and it is easy to point to it and say, “I did that.” But then the question shifts. What happens when your value is no longer in the code you write, the spreadsheet you finish, or the ticket you close?

The hard truth is that the transition from being a technical expert to becoming a leader is not automatic.

Time alone will not take you there.

It requires a conscious decision to change how you see your role and, more importantly, how you measure yourself. Instead of proving your worth through personal output, you start measuring it in how much clarity you bring to the table, how much trust others place in you, and how far your team can go with your support.

The challenge is that this shift is uncomfortable.

You have to give up the comfort of being the person with the answers, the one who can always fix things quickly. You trade the quick satisfaction of solving problems yourself for something slower, something less visible: the growth of others. And in the beginning, it feels like you are losing part of yourself.

But that is only the surface. Beneath it, something much bigger is happening. By stepping back, you allow space for others to step forward. You multiply your influence not by doing more, but by helping others do better.

The problems you no longer solve directly get solved anyway, and often in ways you would not have imagined yourself. That is the moment you begin to see that your value is no longer tied to your personal contribution, but to the culture and capacity of the team you are shaping.

This trade-off is not for everyone. Some people find meaning in always being hands-on, and there is nothing wrong with that. But for those willing to embrace the slower, harder path of leadership, the

reward is a kind of impact that no amount of individual work can match. And maybe the real question is not how valuable you are today, but how you want your value to be remembered tomorrow.