Over the weekend I had some great conversations with friends and colleagues who are in a season of immense growth, expanded scope at work, bigger expectations, and that familiar mix of excitement and imposter syndrome.
Naturally, the conversation turned to As We Become and how I might frame advice through that lens. Here's what I told them.
When your scope expands, it's tempting to treat it like a promotion, more responsibility, more influence, more visibility.
But the real shift is that the way you create value has to change.
In a smaller role, you can win by being excellent. You GSD, you execute, you're the person who always figures it out. In a bigger role, you win by building the conditions where other people can be excellent.
That means creating clarity, sharpening priorities, setting standards and operating rhythms, and investing in trust. That's where leverage lives.
The Gut Check
Here's the question I'd ask if I were in their shoes:
If you disappeared for two weeks, would the work stall, or would the system hold?
If it stalls, you are still operating like the hero. If it holds, you are starting to operate like a leader.
This isn't a criticism. It's a diagnostic. Most of us spent years becoming the person who could be relied on to figure anything out. That's how you earn scope in the first place. But the same instincts that got you here will limit you if you don't evolve them.
The hero solves the problem. The leader builds the system that makes the problem solvable without them. These are genuinely different jobs, and the transition between them is where most talented people get stuck.
What the Transition Actually Requires
It requires giving up things you're good at. Letting problems sit longer than feels comfortable so someone else can develop the muscle. Investing time in conversations that don't produce immediate output, one-on-ones, context-setting, the slow work of building team confidence.
It also requires a different relationship with visibility. Heroes are visible because of what they do. Leaders are visible because of what their team does. That's not a loss. It's a different kind of proof.
The organizations that scale well are almost always the ones with leaders who figured out how to make this shift. Not because they stopped caring about excellence, but because they redirected that same drive toward building the conditions for excellence at a level they couldn't personally reach alone.
The work of becoming isn't doing more. It's becoming different.