After a promotion, many leaders keep doing a version of their old job for far longer than they meant to. It can look like being busy. More often it is about where they feel most sure of themselves. Holding on is a question of identity more than time, which is why advice to delegate tends to bounce off. The real work of stepping up is letting the job you were best at belong to someone else.

When we talk about women being under-represented in technology leadership, we tend to picture the top. New McKinsey research points much earlier. Across all five job families it studied, the sharpest fall in women's representation comes at the first step into management, the move from technical expert to leader. It is a transition I made myself, and the one I most often coach women through. This is why that step is harder than it looks, and where the attention needs to begin.

Promotions to executive level are often described in terms of scale. A bigger team, a bigger budget, a bigger remit. It makes the role sound like more of the same. It is not. Melody Wilding writes about this in an HBR article on the move from manager to executive. She describes the shifts from expert to coach, from execution to achieving impact through others, and from personal oversight to systems that can work at scale. She also makes an important point about satisfaction.

AI is changing the value of expertise. When knowledge is easy to access and technical work can be done quickly, knowing the most no longer sets you apart. Drawing on Roslansky and Raman's Open to Work, this piece looks at the five human capabilities that hold their value, why experts moving into leadership have to change how they judge their own worth, and why waiting for someone else to shape the next step is becoming a riskier strategy.