The Draftee — The Leaders in Our Neighborhood

She didn’t apply for the job. They just gave it to her. Nobody asked. Nobody trained her. She’s been figuring it out alone ever since.

She was the best engineer on the team. So they made her the manager.

Nobody asked if she wanted to manage people. Nobody told her that management is a different skill set, not a promotion from engineering. Nobody sat her down and said, “The thing that made you exceptional at your old job is not the thing that will make you exceptional at this one.”

They just gave her the title, moved her into a slightly bigger office, and assumed she’d figure it out.

I coached a director — we’ll call her Lydia — who was eighteen months into a role she never applied for. Her old boss left. She was the most senior person on the team. The company needed someone fast, and Lydia was right there. So they gave her the job.

When I met her, she was working twelve-hour days and her team was still underperforming. She was doing all of her old work plus all of the management work, which meant she was doing both at about sixty percent.

I asked her: “What percentage of your week do you spend doing the work your team should be doing?”

She thought for a moment. “Probably seventy percent.”

Seventy percent. She was spending nearly three-quarters of her week doing her old job — the job she was great at, the job that felt natural, the job where she knew exactly what good looked like. The management work got whatever was left. And whatever was left wasn’t enough.

Here’s what nobody tells The Draftee: the discomfort you’re feeling isn’t a sign that you’re failing. It’s a sign that you’re doing something new. And new things feel terrible before they feel normal.

The problem is that your old job is right there. It’s sitting on your desk, calling your name, offering you the comfort of competence. Every time you pick it up, you feel like yourself again. Every time you put it down and try to lead, you feel like a fraud.

I told Lydia: “You’re not a bad leader. You’re a great individual contributor who hasn’t given herself permission to be mediocre at something new long enough to get good at it.”

That’s the 80% Rule. You don’t need to be great at your new role on day one. You need to be willing to be eighty percent for a while — to feel that discomfort, to sit in the gap between who you were and who you’re becoming — and trust that the gap closes with practice, not with retreat.

What it’s like to live next door to The Draftee.

Frustrating, but not in the way you’d expect. The Draftee isn’t a bad boss. They’re actually very competent — at the wrong things. They’ll jump into the weeds with you, solve problems alongside you, do work that should be yours. It feels helpful in the moment. But over time you realize: you’re not being developed. You’re being outworked by your own manager.

The team never gets stretched because the leader is always in the trenches doing the work instead of creating the conditions for the team to grow. And the irony is, the team sees what’s happening. They watch their manager drowning in twelve-hour days and think: I never want that job.

If this sounds familiar — if you got the title but never got the transition — here’s the thing.

You are not an imposter. You are a person in a new role who hasn’t updated their operating system yet. The software that made you brilliant as an individual contributor needs an upgrade for the altitude you’re at now.

One thing to try this week: look at your calendar and put a red dot next to every hour you spend doing work your team should be doing. Not managing them. Not developing them. Doing their work. Count the dots. That number is the size of the gap between the job you have and the job you’re actually doing.

Closing that gap doesn’t require brilliance. It requires permission — permission to let go of the thing you were great at so you can become something you’ve never been before.

The question on the porch:

When was the last time you spent a full day doing the job you were hired for — not the one you used to have? If you can’t remember, you haven’t made the transition yet. And that’s okay. But naming it is the first step.

The Leaders in Our Neighborhood is a series about the patterns we all recognize — in the people we work with, and sometimes in ourselves.