Coaching & Leadership
Why Does Pressure Increase After a Promotion?
Sometimes the new role moves faster than our sense of who we are in it
Core question
Am I still playing my previous role at a higher level?
In brief
Pressure often rises after promotion when a leader keeps solving work through the habits that earned the promotion. The transition requires redefining success from personal execution toward results through other people.
01
Sometimes the new role moves faster than our sense of who we are in it
Sometimes a person is fully capable of a higher role, wants it, and has worked toward it for years—yet once they enter the role, they discover that what got them here is not enough for what comes next.
Across several executive coaching conversations with managers, one recurring pattern has been this: the person has entered management by title and responsibility, but part of how they still work belongs to the previous role. They still dive into the details themselves, solve problems personally, or delegate and then pull the work back toward themselves.
That experience has become a larger question for me:
“How many of us, after a promotion, are still playing our previous role at a higher level?”
02
Part of the pressure comes from the need to prove oneself
In coaching sessions, promotion does not always appear only as a career goal.
In some conversations, promotion becomes linked with being seen, confirmation of capability, professional standing, or the question of whether the person truly belongs at the next level.
That is one of the important parts of the subject for me.
Because if the new role becomes a place to prove “I am good enough,” making a mistake is no longer only a work mistake.
Asking for help is no longer only asking for help.
Not knowing is no longer only not knowing.
Each can become a threat to the image of competence the person wants to protect.
Then the manager, instead of only asking:
“What decision does this situation need?”
May also be caught in another question at the same time:
“What does this decision show about me?”
Those two questions are not the same.
When promotion itself starts to feel like a test of self-worth, the companion essay on when promotion becomes a test of self-worth takes that question from another angle.
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What can executive coaching do at this point?
The coach is not there to tell the manager:
“Delegate more.”
Or:
“Raise your confidence.”
Or to decide what work should go to whom.
For me, the value of coaching is more in creating a space where the manager can distinguish among several things:
The real pressure of the role, and the pressure they have added themselves.
The organization’s real expectation, and the expectation they imagine exists.
A skill issue, and an identity issue.
Responsibility that truly belongs to them, and responsibility they have kept out of habit.
Research by Kirschner and Terblanche with 686 managers from more than 300 organizations found that after coaching, managers spoke more about change in team leadership, communication, developing others and executive presence. The reported pattern from colleagues’ feedback was somewhat similar. Still, the study relies mainly on managers’ own reports and their retelling of others’ feedback, so it should not be read as proof of a definite causal relationship.
For me, coaching’s role sits here:
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Perhaps “Am I ready for this role?” is not the most precise question
Because readiness for a higher role does not necessarily mean knowing every answer from day one.
Perhaps the real meaning of readiness is being able to recognize:
What is still useful,
What still needs to be learned,
And what once drove our success and now needs to change.
If after a promotion or taking on larger responsibility you feel pressure, before concluding “I am not suited to this role,” three questions may be worth pausing on:
“Which part of my previous role am I still carrying with me?”
“What work do I still think only I can do?”
And perhaps the hardest:
“If I did not need to prove something about my worth in this role, what would I do differently?”
Sometimes the next level does not only need a new skill.
It needs a new definition of ourselves.
For a pause, try the Leadership Transition Readiness Check.
Research sources
Questions to carry forward
- 01Which part of my previous role am I still carrying with me?
- 02What work do I still think only I can do?
- 03If I did not need to prove something about my worth in this role, what would I do differently?