Three traps when you step up to the next level of influence

Today let’s talk about the interesting traps you meet when moving to a role at the next level of influence in an organisation. For example, from developer (operational level) to tech lead (tactical level), or from tech lead to solution architect (strategic level). Similar moves exist in other tracks too: QA engineer → QA lead → QA manager or Head of QA.

What makes this move hard, apart from new areas of responsibility and new skills? In my experience, the key difficulty is getting past the main development traps quickly.

The first trap is operational work. It literally sucks you in. Only yesterday you could do things with your own hands, and it’s very hard to push that down the priority list. Some people also fear they’ll stop being a professional in their field or lose their colleagues’ respect. Operational work tends to fill all the available time. It wraps you in your comfort zone.

What helps here is controlling how you spend your time and setting daily goals. Ideally, the share of operational work should be just enough not to lose touch with reality. Most often that means 10–20% of your time. If you manage to organise everything perfectly in the new role, you can go up to 30%. If the real share is higher, the person has almost certainly fallen into this trap.

The second trap, in order of importance, is the pull of clear tasks. The brain loves clear tasks: they don’t take much energy and don’t cause stress. But clear tasks can and should be delegated when you move into a new role. The main value of the new role lies in solving complex, unclear problems, or breaking them down into clear ones.

A couple of questions to ask yourself when choosing your next task help here:

• Is this really the most important task for our immediate goals?
• Why should I be the one to take this task? What value will my involvement bring to everyone else?
• Which part of the task needs to be solved with my involvement? Can I delegate this task at some level?

The third trap is closely tied to the second and follows from it. It’s distrust of the quality of other people’s work. The expert mindset from the previous level switches on: “I know exactly how to do this right, and they don’t”. The person starts diving deep into every task or process and trying to take part in every decision, so as not to miss any “deviations from the right path”. That quickly leads to bottlenecks and slowdowns, when everyone waits for one person before they can move on with their work.

The simplest way to check whether you’re in this trap is to look at the share of each day you’re available to your team. If someone needs to find a calendar slot two or three days ahead for an in-depth conversation about a task, you’re up to your ears in this trap.

The main advice here is to mentally let go of the urge to “do everything right” in lower-risk areas. A mistake doesn’t cost the same everywhere, and without mistakes people learn poorly. The delegation levels matrix from Management 3.0 also helps. Define a delegation level for each member of your team and act according to their current levels. And aim to move each of them at least one level up within three to six months.

What traps have you met on your career path when moving into a new role?