The Risk of Competence

Shortly after 7pm on a summer Friday, you close your laptop. Done. Fixed. Finally.

You high-five your reflection in the elevator door on the way down. You did it again, girl. You showed up, you stayed late, you buckled down, and now there’s an email flying over to the CEO that resolves a sticky issue.

Yet while you were creating your masterpiece, your team gathered in the break room, halfway out the door and halfway into the weekend…

…where your top performer was top performing, talking with your team about the deal she’d just closed with their help.

High-fives all around. It was a lot of work, but they’d done it. Then she made everybody laugh. Weekend plans were swapped. Leftover cake disappeared off a paper plate near the Nespresso.

Everyone wanted to be her.

No one wanted to be you.

So what’s happening here?

You’re going home alone with a laptop. You missed the chance to bond with your team. Your team missed seeing you in action as their leader. They missed contributing to the ‘masterpiece’ and learning something that would have stretched their skill set. And they celebrated in the break room while your cortisol took another bite out of your adrenal glands.

This is the risk of competence.

It looks like leadership. It feels like leadership. You’re solving the problem (you think) nobody else can solve. You’re earning your spot. You’re protecting the team from a hard night.

But every time you step in alone, you signal that the work belongs to you. Singular.

Everything you fix alone is a missed rep for someone else. Every late-night solo save tells your team that this is what senior looks like, and most of them quietly decide they don’t want it.

The ones who do want it? They’re watching your top performer in the break room and celebrating teamwork.

Competence is a foundational requirement. You don’t get the title without it. But at a certain level, your expertise stops being the contribution. The contribution becomes who else can do the thing that used to be your thing.

When your expertise gets in the way of growing your team as experts, as colleagues, and as people, you risk losing both them and yourself in the process. They don’t grow. You don’t either. And the next sticky issue lands on your desk again, because where else would it go?

At the senior level, competence isn’t what you can do. It’s what your team can do because of you.

The Friday night fix feels like the job. It isn’t.

The job is making sure the next Friday night fix doesn’t need you at all.

You don’t have to navigate challenges like these alone. I’d love to be your thinking partner: www.kathygledhill.com

And if you’d like to read a book about why this matters more than you think, check out “The Power of Mattering,” by Zach Mercurio.