The Higher You Go, the Less It Should Be About Having the Answer
Seniority should increase influence, not only the difficulty of the work you personally carry.
Where does your experience create the most leverage?
YouTubeThis article is inspired by real leadership coaching conversations. All identifying details, including names, genders, roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context, have been removed, generalised or combined to protect privacy. Any transcript excerpts have been edited for clarity and anonymity while preserving the underlying leadership lesson.
Rethinking seniority
I had several conversations recently that kept bringing me back to the same question: what should actually change when someone becomes more senior?
The obvious answer is usually that the work gets harder. You become the person who handles the bigger problem, the more complicated situation, or the issue that everyone else has struggled to resolve. That makes sense for a while. Expertise should matter, and there are moments where experience is exactly what the situation needs.
But in one conversation I found myself wondering whether we had taken that logic too far. I was speaking with someone who was already highly capable. They were trusted, experienced, and naturally pulled into difficult situations. If something became complicated, people wanted them involved. The easy development answer would have been to give them more of the same, just at a higher level of complexity.
The more we spoke, though, the less convinced I became that this was the right definition of progression. At some point, seniority cannot simply mean becoming the person who solves the hardest problem. There has to be a shift from the difficulty of the work you personally carry to the influence your experience has on the wider organisation.
The question I eventually came back to was: where does your experience create the most leverage?
That changed the conversation. The answer was not necessarily in the final stage of a difficult problem. It might be much earlier, when a decision is still being shaped. It might be helping two groups see the same issue from different angles, spotting a risk before it becomes an escalation, or challenging whether a piece of work should exist at all. The opportunity was not to become an even better firefighter. It was to be involved early enough that fewer fires started.
In one of those conversations, I said something that I have since kept thinking about. The wording has been generalised, but the point was simple:
"Your influence should extend beyond the boundaries of your immediate team."
Responsibility and authority
I think organisations often work against this without realising it. We promote people because of their expertise, then continue consuming nearly all of their capacity inside the exact area where that expertise was built. They remain the escalation point, the reviewer, the person who gets the unusual problem. Then we tell them they need to become more strategic.
That is a difficult contradiction to ask someone to solve on their own.
The same thing came up when we talked about decision-making. If somebody has the context, judgement and experience to make a decision, but every meaningful decision still has to travel upwards for reassurance, we are not really empowering them. We are giving them responsibility while keeping the authority somewhere else.
I found myself saying:
"If you have the context, expertise and judgement, I should be able to trust you to make the decision."
Changing my own contribution
What stayed with me afterwards was how much this connected to my own progression as a leader. Earlier in my management career, I thought credibility meant understanding nearly everything the team was doing. I wanted enough technical depth that, if something went wrong, I could jump in, solve the problem and give the answer. It made me feel useful, and for a long time I probably equated that usefulness with good management.
I have changed my mind about that.
The further I have moved from doing the work myself, the more I have realised that people do not always need me to provide the final answer. Often they need me to help them think through the problem, challenge an assumption, connect them to someone with better expertise than mine, or create enough clarity for them to make the decision themselves. Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is simply make it clear that I trust their judgement.
That is a less visible form of leadership. Solving a problem gives you an immediate result. You can point to the thing that was fixed. Strategic influence is harder to see. You might ask a question that changes the direction of a decision, introduce two people who needed to be in the same conversation, or deliberately choose not to intervene when you could have. Your fingerprints become less obvious even while your influence grows.
For the person I was coaching, the shift was not to stop doing difficult work. Their expertise still mattered. The shift was in how they thought about where that expertise should be spent. Instead of asking only, "Can I solve this?", the better questions became: "Am I the right person to solve this?", "Could my involvement earlier create more value?", and "Could someone else take this and grow through doing it?"
The conditions around the person
My own learning was slightly different. I realised how easy it is for a leader to tell someone to "be more strategic" without changing any of the conditions around them. If their calendar is dominated by execution, if they are rewarded for rescuing the hardest situations, and if they are not included in the conversations where broader decisions are made, then asking them to operate at a higher level is not really development. It is a contradiction.
So the follow-up for me is not simply to keep encouraging senior people to think differently. I need to look at the environment around them. Do they have access to the right conversations? Do they have the context to contribute? Do they have genuine decision authority? And, perhaps most importantly, have we removed enough of the work that keeps dragging them back into execution?
I still value leaders who can get close to the work. I do not think seniority should mean becoming detached from reality. But I am increasingly convinced that the higher someone goes, the less their value should depend on personally having every answer.
The better test may be whether their experience is improving the quality of thinking and judgement around them, even when they are no longer the person doing the solving.
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