The chief technology officer sat across from me and described, with real pride, the night fifteen years ago when he saved a launch that everyone else had already written off. He stayed until four in the morning, rewrote the integration layer himself, and shipped on schedule. He still tells that story, because it is the story of how he became who he is. What he had come to talk about was smaller and harder to say out loud. His engineering organization had grown from forty people to almost three hundred, and at fifty-three he was still trying to be the person who stays until four in the morning.

He had not lost the skill. On the narrow technical question he could still out-code most of the engineers who reported to him. The gap that had opened was between the thing he was best at and the thing his role now needed from him, and every year that gap widened while he kept doing what had always worked.

The seat changed while you were sitting in it

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, the chief science officer at the executive search firm Russell Reynolds, put the uncomfortable version of this in Harvard Business Review in June. Most of the worry about AI and jobs has pointed downward, at call-center agents and junior analysts and entry-level coders. He argues the top of the org chart is being redrawn just as thoroughly, with far less notice, and that there is very little chance the attributes and behaviors that made a senior leader effective in the past will keep making them effective in the future.1 His conclusion is that organizations should start selecting senior people less for what they have already accomplished and more for what they might be capable of next.

His firm sells the forward-looking executive assessment that conclusion happens to recommend, which is worth keeping in view while you read it. The observation underneath the sales pitch is still true, and most of the leaders I work with recognize it in themselves well before they will say it out loud.

Why the strong get stuck

The mechanism is not mysterious. A person gets promoted for a specific strength, so that strength becomes the move they reach for under pressure, because it has paid off every time and because, somewhere along the way, it stopped being something they do and became something they are. The chief technology officer does not rewrite the integration layer because the organization needs him to. He does it because being the person who can is the load-bearing wall of how he understands himself.

Then the organization helps him stay there. His directors escalate decisions upward because it is faster and safer than deciding for themselves, and each time he catches one, it confirms the old story that he is still the one who solves things. What he cannot see from inside the pattern is the cost. Every escalation he accepts is a judgment his directors do not develop. He is not building a bench so much as renting himself out to it, one late night at a time.

The behaviors that earn a person the seat are very often the same behaviors that stop them from doing the job the seat actually requires.

What the work actually is

When a leader like this lands in coaching, the temptation is to treat it as a skills gap and hand him a development plan. That almost never works, because the problem is not that he lacks a competence. He is being asked to loosen his grip on the one he built his life around, and that feels less like learning and more like loss. There is real grief in it. Naming the grief, saying out loud that he misses being the one who solved the thing at four in the morning, tends to open the conversation the development plan was papering over.

From there the work gets concrete and small. We separate using the strength from hiding behind it, because the expertise itself was never what needed fixing. What needed attention was how heavily he leaned on it. We look for a moment earlier in his career when he already let go of an identity that had stopped serving him, because a person who has reinvented once has evidence they can do it again. And we run low-stakes experiments, the kind that sound almost trivial. Hold your answer in one meeting this week. Ask a question rather than solving the thing. Small changes in behavior tend to arrive before the larger change in how someone sees themselves.

None of this is comfortable, and the discomfort is most of the point. The leaders who move through it well are usually the ones willing to sit with a question that has an edge to it. What would you have to stop being known for, in order to become what your role now needs? That one tends to land somewhere deeper than the org chart. I am curious what surfaces for you when you sit with it, and what you have watched happen to the leaders around you who never did.