Career Growth Is Mostly About Leverage

You’re the person who gets things done. You deliver consistently, produce quality work, hit every deadline. Your manager depends on you. Your team relies on you. You’re objectively good at your job.

And yet, promotions go to people who seem less productive. People who spend half their time in meetings. People who delegate constantly. People who, if you’re honest, don’t seem to work as hard as you do.

The problem isn’t that the system is unfair—it’s that career advancement rewards leverage, not effort, and you’re still optimizing for personal output.

The Problem

You measure your value by what you personally accomplish. Lines of code written. Tickets closed. Projects completed. Analyses delivered. These are concrete, measurable, yours.

So you maximize your personal output. You work efficiently. You minimize time wasted in meetings. You focus on execution. You become exceptionally good at doing things yourself.

This works at junior levels. When you’re an individual contributor, your value is your personal output. The better you execute, the more valuable you are. But at some point—often without realizing it—the game changes.

Senior roles aren’t about how much you can personally accomplish. They’re about how much you can make possible for others. How much impact you can enable. How much value you can create through systems, people, and processes beyond your direct work.

But you’re still playing the old game. You’re trying to be the best individual contributor when the people getting promoted are learning to be force multipliers.

Why this happens to high performers

Research suggests that the transition from individual contributor to leader requires a fundamental shift in how you create value—from doing to enabling. But many people never make this shift because doing is what got them recognized in the first place.

Many people find that they’re trapped by their own competence. You’re so good at execution that leadership keeps you executing. You’re too valuable as a doer to be promoted to a role where you’d enable others to do.

The cruel irony is that the behaviors that made you successful early in your career actively prevent advancement later. Being the go-to person who handles everything personally. Being the one who can’t say no because the work won’t get done otherwise. Being indispensable in your current role makes you unsuitable for the next one.

What you don’t realize is that senior people aren’t necessarily more skilled at execution—they’re better at leverage. They know how to amplify impact through others. They understand that 10 people working at 80% efficiency produces more value than one person working at 100% efficiency.

What Most People Try

The most common approach is to just work harder and produce more. If personal output got you this far, more personal output will get you further. Take on additional projects. Volunteer for high-visibility work. Increase your individual impact.

This creates a trap. The more you produce individually, the more you’re valued as a producer, not a leader. You become the person who does things, not the person who makes things happen. Your promotion requires you to stop doing what you’re being rewarded for.

Then there’s the visibility approach: make sure your work is seen. Share updates. Present at meetings. Build relationships with decision-makers. This helps, but many people find that visibility without leverage just makes you a visible individual contributor, not a leader.

Some try to shift into management by explicitly asking for direct reports or a leadership title. But many organizations don’t promote people into leadership until they’re already demonstrating leadership behavior—which means creating leverage before you have formal authority.

Others try to “think more strategically” or “be more proactive”—the vague advice given in performance reviews. But without understanding what leverage actually means, this usually translates to doing their current work plus additional strategic thinking, which just means more personal work.

The fundamental issue with all these approaches is they’re additive—doing your current work plus leadership behaviors—when what’s required is substitutive. Less personal execution, more enabling others. Less doing, more multiplying.

What Actually Helps

1. Shift from execution to force multiplication

Instead of asking “what can I accomplish today?” start asking “how can I make my team accomplish more today?” Your value isn’t what you do—it’s what becomes possible because you’re there.

This means deliberately reducing your personal output to increase collective output. It feels wrong at first because you’re doing less individually. But research suggests that teams with good force multipliers outperform teams of individually brilliant executors.

Many people find this terrifying because it feels like becoming less useful. “If I’m not personally doing the work, what’s my value?” But the value isn’t in doing—it’s in enabling doing. Building systems, removing blockers, clarifying priorities, connecting dots, making decisions that let everyone else work better.

Here’s how to start: Identify something you do regularly that someone else could do at 80% of your quality. Not 100%—it won’t be as good as you’d do it. But 80% that’s good enough. Delegate it. Teach them. Let it be imperfect.

Your instinct will be to redo it yourself or fix all the gaps. Resist. The goal isn’t to get that one task done perfectly—it’s to multiply your capacity. If you can delegate three things at 80% quality, you’ve freed up time to focus on things only you can do or to enable even more delegation.

Do this consistently and your personal output drops while your team’s output increases. That’s leverage. That’s what senior people do.

2. Build systems that work without you

Right now, you’re probably the system. People come to you with questions. You have the knowledge. You make the decisions. You’re the critical path for getting things done.

This feels valuable—you’re needed, essential, indispensable. But it’s the opposite of leverage. You’re a bottleneck. Your capacity caps the team’s capacity.

The shift is creating systems, documentation, processes, and frameworks that work without you. Your value becomes embedded in structures that persist and scale beyond your personal presence.

Many people find this counterintuitive because it feels like you’re making yourself obsolete. “If everything works without me, why do they need me?” But research suggests that people who build systems that don’t require them get promoted because they’ve demonstrated they can scale beyond personal execution.

Here’s what this looks like in practice: Next time you solve a problem or make a decision, document how you did it. Not what you decided, but the framework you used to make the decision. Turn your personal judgment into a reproducible process.

When someone asks you a question repeatedly, don’t just answer it—create documentation so they can answer it themselves next time. When you solve a problem, build a system so the problem doesn’t recur. When you’re the expert on something, transfer that expertise through writing, pairing, teaching.

Your goal is that the team functions at 90% capacity when you’re not there. Not because you’re unimportant, but because you’ve built systems that capture and scale your judgment. That’s what makes you promotable—you’ve proven you can create value beyond yourself.

3. Make other people successful instead of being successful yourself

The hardest mental shift is from “my success” to “their success through me.” Right now, your wins are probably individual achievements: you delivered the project, you solved the problem, you created the analysis.

Senior roles are measured by collective success: the team hit the target, the initiative succeeded, the organization improved. And specifically, collective success that wouldn’t have happened without your enabling role.

Many people find this psychologically difficult because it means your contribution becomes less visible. You’re not the one who wrote the code or made the sale—you’re the one who made it possible for others to write better code or make more sales.

Here’s how to start: Identify someone on your team who could grow with the right opportunity. Give them a project that’s slightly beyond their current level. Not something you need to do yourself—something that stretches them.

Then do the hardest thing: step back. Be available for guidance, but don’t do it for them. Let them struggle. Let them make mistakes. Coach rather than execute. Your success is measured by whether they successfully complete something they couldn’t have done before, not by how good the output is compared to if you’d done it yourself.

When they succeed, your value is that you created capacity that didn’t exist before. When they fail, your value is that you taught them something that makes them more capable next time. Either way, you’ve multiplied capability rather than just adding your own.

Do this consistently and you become known as someone who makes people better. That’s leadership. That’s what gets you promoted. Not being the best individual performer, but creating conditions where everyone performs better.

The Takeaway

Career growth at senior levels isn’t about working harder or producing more individually—it’s about creating leverage that multiplies impact beyond your personal capacity. Stop optimizing for personal output and start optimizing for collective output enabled by you. Delegate to create capacity, build systems that work without you, and measure your success by others’ success. You’re not becoming less valuable by doing less yourself—you’re becoming more valuable by making more possible. The promotion doesn’t go to the best executor. It goes to the person who proves they can multiply value beyond what they personally produce.