Transitioning to management is like moving to a foreign country; your identity, skills, and sources of fulfillment all shift. Success requires adapting to this new reality. Trying to operate with your old expert mindset will lead to frustration and feeling lost.

Promoting top individual contributors into management often backfires. Their competitive nature, which drove individual success, makes it hard to share tips, empathize with struggling team members, or handle interpersonal issues, turning a perceived win-win into a lose-lose situation.

Building a team is a complex system that changes with every interaction; it can't be solved with fixed instructions. Unlike a complicated but predictable task like building a Ferrari, leading a team requires constant experimentation, sensing, and responding to an ever-evolving dynamic.

Leaders in investment organizations are often promoted for their exceptional technical skills—analysis, presentations—not for their management abilities. This creates a leadership deficit that requires deliberate focus and coaching to overcome.

New leaders often fail because they continue to operate with an individual contributor mindset. Success shifts from personal problem-solving ("soloist") to orchestrating the success of others ("conductor"). This requires a fundamental change in self-perception and approach, not just learning new skills.

The "treat others as you want to be treated" mantra fails in leadership because individuals have different motivations and work styles. Effective leaders adapt their approach, recognizing that their preferred hands-off style might not work for someone who needs more direct guidance.

Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.

Many leaders focus on having the correct analysis. However, true leadership requires understanding that being right is useless if you can't persuade and influence others. The most successful leaders shift their focus from proving their correctness to finding the most effective way to communicate and achieve their goals.

The transition from manager to director requires a shift from managing tactical details to 'directing.' A director's value comes from high-level strategy, cross-departmental resource connection, and solving organizational problems, not from knowing more than their direct reports.