Nobody Promotes The Engine

Career · Leadership

By Feras Asakrieh · 5 min read · Issue #39

I was on a work call the night my child was born.

Let me say that again, because it still stings.

My wife was in the bed. The baby was coming. And I had my phone pressed to my ear, solving a problem that only I knew how to solve.

Nobody made me take that call. That is the part I have to own. I took it because I was the person who took it. That was the deal I had quietly made with everybody, including myself.

By then I had climbed from answering phones to VP of Customer Experience and Sales at Citi. I was proud of that. I earned every step by being the one who could fix anything. The go to. The person who never dropped the ball.

And I sat in that seat ten years too long.

My health cracked. My marriage strained. The harder I worked, the more stuck I got, and I could not figure out why.

I Was Not Leading the Work. I Was the Work.

Here is what nobody warned me about.

The better I got at doing everything, the more everything ran through me. Every decision. Every escalation. Every "let me just handle it." I built a machine and then I made myself the one part it could not run without.

That felt like power. People needed me. My phone never stopped. I read all of it as proof that I mattered.

It was not power. It was a cage I built by hand, one favor at a time.

You cannot promote the engine. You just keep it running.

Why the Best Manager on the Team Is the One Who Gets Left There

Look at it from their side for a second.

If the work falls apart the day you step out of that seat, why would anyone move you out of it? They would be trading a working team for a broken one. So they do the rational thing. They keep you exactly where you are, tell you how valuable you are, and hand the seat above you to someone else.

That is the cruel math. The more indispensable you are, the harder you are to promote. You did not make yourself promotable. You made yourself too expensive to lose.

And it never feels like a mistake while you are doing it. It feels like being good at your job.

Listen to what people actually tell themselves.

"It's faster if I just do it." It is. Today. That one sentence is how you stay a doer for a decade.

"If someone else does it and it's wrong, it's my name on it." True. Also the reason you will still be doing it in five years.

"They need me. That's job security." It is. That is the problem. You have security in the exact job you are trying to leave.

"I'll delegate once things calm down." Things do not calm down. There is no quiet quarter coming. That one eats careers.

And then the one almost nobody says out loud.

"If it runs without me, what am I even for?"

That is the real one. That is fear wearing a work costume. Until you say it out loud, none of the rest of this works.

Here Is How You Get Out

1. Name the one thing you are holding because it makes you feel needed.

Not the thing that is hard. The thing that makes you feel important. There is a difference, and you already know which is which.

There is something on your plate right now that you could hand over this week. You have not. And the reason is not capacity. The reason is that it is a small daily proof that you still matter.

For me it was escalations. Any messy customer situation came straight to me. I told myself it was because I handled them best. The truth is I liked being the person they called.

Write the list of what only you do. Then mark the ones that are there because of ego, not because of risk. Be honest. Nobody is reading it but you.

2. Do not hand it off. Build the thing that does it.

This is the whole shift, and it is where almost everyone stops short.

Handing work off is delegation. You are still the engine, you just moved a belt. The second it goes sideways it comes right back to you, because nothing actually changed except who was holding it for a week.

Building a system is different. It is the one page playbook. The eight minute screen recording. The one person you truly trained instead of just told.

Take my escalations. Delegation would have been "you take the next angry client." A system was a one page decision tree. Here is what you fix yourself. Here is what gets a credit, and the exact wording to use. Here is the only case that comes to me. That page took two hours to write. It bought back four years of interruptions.

A manager makes the work happen. A director makes sure the work happens without them.

3. Change what your team is allowed to bring you.

Right now your team brings you problems. That is not their fault. You trained them. Every time someone walked in stuck and walked out with your answer, you taught them that the fastest road runs through you.

So change the rule, and say it out loud. "Bring me your read and what you want to do. I will say yes, no, or here is what I would change."

It will feel slower for about a month. Their first few reads will be wrong. Let them be wrong on the small stuff, and fix the thinking instead of the task.

Then something happens that you will feel in your chest. People start solving things and telling you about it afterward. That is the sound of a team that runs.

4. Take a real week off and let it wobble.

This is the only honest test there is.

Not a week where you check in every morning. Not a week with the laptop in the bag just in case. A real one. Phone in a drawer. Out of office on. Someone named out loud as the decision maker while you are gone.

Whatever breaks that week is your actual list. Not the list you imagined. The real one. Every fire that needed you is a system you have not built yet.

And here is the part that surprises people. Less breaks than you feared. Some of it runs fine without you, and that stings a little, and it should.

That sting is what a cage opening feels like.

Final Thoughts

I do not get that night back.

That is the thing about this one. The cost never shows up on a performance review. It shows up in a hospital room. In a marriage that had to carry more than it should have. In ten years I spent being excellent at a job I had already outgrown.

I did not get stuck because I was not good enough. I got stuck because I was the best in the building at the wrong thing.

Being needed is not the same as being valued. One keeps you in the chair. The other one moves you out of it.

Build the thing that runs without you. Then go be somewhere else.

P.S. I spent the last few months writing down every shift I had to make to get from manager to director. Ten of them. What you just read was one. The other nine are here, in Get to Director: The Small Shifts.

Nobody Promotes The Engine

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