This post is part of Altitude & Ego, a nine-part series on the tension between individual satisfaction and collective success in organizations. It explores this paradox at four altitudes and examines the dynamics that cut across them.
DISCLAIMER: views and commentary are my own. I welcome conversation and constructive disagreement. The goal: help myself and others think more clearly by expressing ideas, testing them, and refining them over time.
You got promoted. Congratulations. You were good at the job, so now you have a different job. One that uses some of the same skills, requires a bunch of new ones, and comes with a complication nobody warned you about: you still have an ego, but you’re not supposed to use it the same way anymore.
When you were an individual contributor, the rules were clear. Hit your number. Close your deals. Get recognized for your wins. The ego had a direct outlet. You wanted to win, you worked to win, and when you won, the scoreboard said so. Whatever satisfaction you got from the work, at least part of it came from seeing your name on the board.
Now you’re the manager. Your name isn’t on the deals anymore. Your team’s names are. Your job is to help them succeed, to develop their skills, to hit a collective number that depends on people you can influence but not control. The job description says you’re a coach, a mentor, a servant leader. The incentive structure says your bonus depends on their production. The organizational narrative says you should find satisfaction in their wins.
And you do. Mostly. Sometimes genuinely, sometimes because you know you’re supposed to. But underneath that, quieter and less acceptable, there’s a question you don’t ask out loud: What about me?
The Ego Doesn’t Disappear
Here’s what I’ve learned from five years in this role: the ego that made you successful as an individual contributor doesn’t vanish when you become a manager. It just loses its primary outlet. And if you don’t figure out where to put it, it leaks into places that hurt you and your team.
The most common leak is what I call big-dealing yourself into deals. A client meeting is scheduled, and you find a reason to join. You tell yourself it’s for coaching purposes, or to add executive presence, or to help close. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes you’re there because you miss being the one in the room doing the thing. You miss the pitch, the negotiation, the moment when the deal turns. And without realizing it, you start to take over. You answer questions that your rep could have answered. You build the relationship with the client that should be your rep’s relationship. You feel useful, but you’ve undermined the person you were supposed to develop.
I’ve done this. More than once. Sometimes I caught it in the moment. Sometimes I only saw it later, when I asked myself why a rep who had been growing suddenly seemed less confident, less willing to take ownership. The answer was often that I had been standing in their light without noticing.
The other common leak is living vicariously through your top performers. Their wins become your wins in a way that’s different from healthy team pride. You over-invest in their deals, their career trajectories, their success, because it feels like an extension of your own. When they succeed, you feel successful. When they struggle, you feel it as a personal failure. This isn’t entirely wrong, some investment is appropriate, but when it tips too far, you start to distort your management. You give more attention to the people who make you feel like a winner and less to the ones who need development but don’t reflect glory back at you.
The Translation Burden
If the ego problem is the internal challenge of this role, the translation burden is the external one.
As a manager of individual contributors, you sit at a seam in the organization. Above you, leadership sets strategy, allocates resources, changes priorities. Below you, your team executes against those priorities while dealing with client realities that don’t always match the strategy. Your job is to translate in both directions. Explain leadership’s decisions to your team in a way that makes sense and doesn’t breed cynicism. Explain your team’s reality to leadership in a way that’s honest without sounding like excuse-making.
Neither side fully trusts you. Your team suspects you’re management now, drinking the Kool-Aid, not really one of them anymore. Leadership suspects you’ve gone native, too protective of your people, not tough enough on performance. You’re a bridge, which means both sides are standing on you.
This translation role is exhausting in ways that don’t show up on any performance review. You spend hours in meetings explaining why a strategic pivot makes sense, privately thinking it might not. You absorb frustration from your team about comp changes or territory realignments, knowing you can’t fix it, trying to help them make peace with it anyway. You bring feedback up the chain and watch it disappear into a bureaucratic process that spits out something unrecognizable three months later. The work of holding the organization together across this seam is invisible, often thankless, and absolutely necessary.
What You Can See Now
The strange gift of this role is that you start to see things you couldn’t see before, in both directions.
Looking down, you see patterns in your team members that they can’t see in themselves. The rep who thinks they’re ready for management but can’t handle feedback. The one who blames the territory for problems that follow them from territory to territory. The high performer who succeeds through sheer effort but hasn’t built a repeatable process. The quiet contributor who’s more capable than their confidence allows them to show. You hold this knowledge, and the question becomes what to do with it. How do you help someone grow without being condescending? How do you deliver hard truths without crushing motivation? How do you honor what someone wants for themselves while seeing clearly that they’re not ready for it?
Looking up, some illusions shatter and others form. You get closer to how decisions actually get made at the leadership level, and it’s often messier than you expected. The strategy that seemed stupid from below turns out to be a least-bad option given constraints you didn’t know existed. The leader who seemed out of touch turns out to be fighting battles you never saw. But also: some leaders really don’t know what they’re doing. Some decisions really are as bad as they looked from below. The view from the middle doesn’t automatically vindicate leadership. It just makes the picture more complicated.
The Sacrifice Calculus
One of the hardest parts of managing individual contributors is the math on developing people.
You pour time into someone. You coach them, advocate for them, give them opportunities, help them build their skills. And then one of two things happens: they get promoted out of your team, or they leave the company for a better opportunity somewhere else. Either way, you lose them. The investment you made walks out the door.
The question is whether you see that as a loss or as the point.
The managers who hoard talent, who subtly block their best people from visibility, who find reasons why that top performer isn’t quite ready for promotion, they’re not evil. They’re just doing math that prioritizes their own short-term team performance over their people’s long-term careers. And in a system that measures managers primarily on team output, that math can feel rational.
But it’s corrosive. Word gets out. The best people start to avoid your team because they’ve heard you’re a dead end. The ones who stay get resentful. You win quarters but lose years. And on some level, you know you’re not doing the job the way it should be done. You’re just doing the job the way the incentives told you to do it.
The alternative is harder. You invest in people knowing they’ll leave. You advocate for their promotions even when it creates a hole in your team. You build careers, not just capacity. And you find satisfaction in watching people you developed succeed in places you’ll never go. This is the “servant leader” ideal, and when it’s real, it’s genuinely admirable.
But I want to be honest: I don’t fully trust this narrative, including when I tell it about myself. Is the manager who claims to find satisfaction in others’ success genuinely wired that way, or are they performing a role they think they should play? Is there a version of selflessness that’s actually ego in disguise, a way of feeling morally superior to the managers who play the short game? I don’t know. I suspect the honest answer is that most of us are a mix, doing the right thing sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for reasons that are more complicated.
Managing the Seam You Didn’t Ask For
One more structural burden of this role: you often end up owning the relationship between functions that have different incentives.
In a media sales organization, the sales team and the sales support team need each other but aren’t aligned by default. Sales wants deals closed, even messy ones. Support wants processes followed, even when it slows things down. Sales gets the credit when things go well. Support gets the blame when things go badly. The glory distribution is asymmetric, and everyone feels it.
As a manager of individual contributors, you often sit at this seam, whether or not anyone told you that was part of your job. When your rep is frustrated with Strategy or Campaign Management, they come to you. When Strategy and Campaign Management is frustrated with your rep, it’s your relationship to manage. You become the diplomat, the smoother-over, the person who translates between functions that speak different languages and measure success differently. This is valuable work. It’s also work that no one thanks you for and that doesn’t show up in your performance review as clearly as your team’s revenue number.
The Counter-Narrative
I’ve painted this role as a kind of noble suffering: absorbing pressure, translating across seams, suppressing ego for the sake of the team. There’s truth to that, but I want to name the counter-narrative too.
Sometimes the “servant leader” framing is self-congratulatory nonsense. Sometimes the team doesn’t need a coach. They need a boss. Someone who makes decisions, holds people accountable, and doesn’t pretend that every outcome should be processed through consensus. The manager who’s too hands-off, who calls it “empowerment,” is sometimes just avoiding the discomfort of direct management. The manager who refuses to assert their own perspective, who always defers to the team, can create a vacuum that gets filled by whoever’s loudest.
And here’s a harder truth: some managers thrive precisely because they haven’t fully subsided their ego. Their ambition pulls the team forward. Their drive to win, to look good, to advance, creates energy that lifts everyone. The “selfless coach” is one model. The “competitive captain” is another. Neither is automatically right.
What Actually Sustains You Here
So what kind of person thrives in this role? I think it’s someone with a particular kind of ego flexibility. They can want things for themselves and subordinate those wants when necessary, without resentment. They can feel the pull of individual ambition and still choose to invest in others. They can tolerate being the bridge that gets walked on from both sides. They find genuine satisfaction in other people’s success, not as a performance but as an actual source of meaning.
That’s the ideal. The reality is messier. Most managers I know, including myself, are some mix of genuine team investment and unrequited personal ambition. The tension doesn’t resolve. You just get better at holding it without letting it leak in destructive ways. Or you don’t, and you become one of the managers people warn each other about.
Questions I’m Still Sitting With
Is the manager who finds meaning in others’ success genuinely wired that way, or performing a role they believe they should play?
What’s the difference between a healthy coach and someone who’s afraid to compete directly?
How do you hold the knowledge you have about your team members without becoming condescending or paternalistic?
When does “servant leadership” become a cover for avoiding hard decisions?