I Took the Promotion and Hated It for Six Months. Here's What Changed.

Four months into the new role I sat in the car park for twenty minutes before going in, and worked out that I could probably get my old job back if I asked. Same company, likely the same desk, and a quiet story about how it hadn't been the right fit. I had the conversation drafted in my head all the way to the lift.

I'm glad I didn't have it. I'm also fairly sure I was right about how bad those four months were.

Nobody actually took the old job off me. That's the trap, and it's almost universal.

I had eleven people, a delivery running to a date I hadn't set, and a technical role that had never formally ended. So I did the leadership work between nine and six, badly, in gaps between meetings I hadn't planned for. Then I did the engineering work from eight in the evening, well, because that was the part I was good at and it was the only part that made me feel competent.

By week six I was working about sixty hours and producing roughly what one adequate person produces. My one to ones got moved, then moved again, then became "grab me if you need anything", which is the phrase people use right before their team stops telling them things.

Effort wasn't the problem. I'd started treating the leadership work as the stuff that happens around the real work, at the point where it had quietly become the real work. Every hour I spent at eight in the evening being excellent at the old job was an hour I'd taken from the new one, and I was choosing it deliberately because it felt better.

A former manager of mine, long since moved on, bought me a coffee in month five because I'd asked to "pick his brain", which I now recognise as a cry for help with a business casual label on it.

I spent about fifteen minutes explaining how much there was to do. He let me finish and then asked one question. "Who's better at their job than they were in January, because of something you did?"

I couldn't answer. Not a single name. I could list eleven people and describe the state of every workstream to the day, and I could not name one person who had grown because I was there.

That question rearranged the whole thing for me, and I've asked myself it every quarter since. It's a brutal measure, because it can't be gamed with activity. You can't answer it by being busy, and it doesn't care how tired you are. It also has a useful side effect: the actions that make it answerable are almost all things you can do in an hour. Hand someone the design review you'd normally chair. Take a junior engineer to the client meeting and let them present their own section. Give feedback specific enough to act on, before the thing goes wrong rather than after.

By about month nine I had four names, and two of them were people I'd previously written off as coasting, who turned out to be bored.

The other thing I got badly wrong was assuming that being seen to be good would be enough.

I had mentors, in a loose sense. People I could ask things. What I didn't have was anybody in the rooms where my name came up saying "give it to him". Those are different people doing different jobs, and the second kind matters more for what happens to your career.

A mentor gives you their time and their honesty. You can have several and the relationship is comfortable, because they risk nothing by advising you. A sponsor puts their own credibility behind you when you're not in the room, which means they need to have seen your work directly, and they need to be confident you won't embarrass them. That's a much higher bar and you can't get there by being generally well regarded.

Two things I'd tell my younger self about this. First, ask directly, because sponsors almost never appoint themselves. Not "can you be my sponsor", which is an odd thing to say out loud, but "I want to be running a delivery of this size within a year. What would I need to have demonstrated for you to back that?" That is a specific, answerable question, and the answer is a plan.

Second, make yourself sponsorable. Volunteer for the thing that's visible and slightly uncomfortable. Present your own bad news to the steering group rather than sending it up for someone else to deliver. Senior people back the person they've watched handle a hard room, because that's the evidence they need.

Here's the thing I'd most want someone to have told me in that car park.

The discomfort didn't go away at month six. What changed is that I stopped reading it as evidence I'd made a mistake. Engineering had trained me to expect a certain feeling: the feeling of knowing exactly what to do next, from experience, with confidence. Leadership rarely gives you that. Most decisions are made with about sixty per cent of the information, about a person you can't fully read, under a deadline somebody else set.

That's not a phase you get through. That's the shape of the work. The people I most respect at this haven't found certainty, they've just stopped needing it before they act. They make the call, they say out loud what would make them change their mind, and they go back and look.

Twenty-five posts ago this series started with the observation that nobody hands you leadership, they just stop protecting you from the consequences of not doing it. That still seems right to me. What I'd add now, at the end of it, is that the compensation is real and it's slower than you want. Nothing in engineering gave me what it feels like to watch someone you backed run a room better than you would have. That took about three years to arrive, which is roughly two and a half years longer than anybody tells you.

Think of one person, senior enough to influence what you get given next, who has seen your actual work rather than just heard about it.

Send them a message on Monday asking for thirty minutes. Go in with one specific thing you want to be doing in twelve months, and one question: what would you need to see from me to back that? Then write down what they tell you, and treat it as the plan, because it is one.

And if you can't name a single person who fits, then you've just found what this quarter is for.