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🤷‍♂️ Feel like you’re not adding value?

One of the biggest shocks for new managers is when the work you used to do (the dashboards, the models, the queries, the experiments) is no longer your job anymore.

Most of that belongs to your team now. And you? You spend your days in meetings, setting direction, managing stakeholders, and fighting for the air cover your team needs to deliver.

It’s important work. It’s leadership. It’s scaling impact.

But it doesn’t feel like work. At least, not in the way you were used to as an IC.

Unfortunately, that’s where manager’s guilt creeps in. You feel like your team is doing all the heavy lifting while you’re just “talking about stuff”. It leaves you questioning your value and whether you’re still contributing enough.

👨🏻‍⚖️ When the guilt takes over

Here’s what it does to you and your career:

1. You cling to old tasks
You dive back into IC work to feel useful. But instead of helping, you slow things down and disempower the people you hired to do the job. This is where micro managers come from so beware!

2. You undervalue your contribution
You forget that strategy, influence, and stakeholder management are real work. If you don’t see the value in it, no one else will either and you’ll struggle to communicate the why to your team and your stakeholders.

3. You struggle to tell your story
You can’t point to neat deliverables anymore to demonstrate your contribution, so when it comes to reviews, promotions, or cross-functional meetings, you may feel like you’ve very little to show for your hard work.

4. You plateau as a leader
By trying to prove yourself through outputs instead of outcomes, you end up stuck in the weeds and miss opportunities to show you’re ready for bigger roles and greater challenges.

Left unchecked, manager’s guilt makes you both a worse manager and a worse IC. Which is where you want to be.

❤️‍🩹 How to avoid feeling like a fraud

Escaping manager’s guilt starts with reframing what “doing work” looks like at your level.

Here’s how to do it:

📐 Define your new outputs
Your deliverables aren’t dashboards or models anymore. They’re things like stronger business alignment, clarity/direction for your team, and influence in the boardroom. Keep a solid record of these so you can see the clear impact you’re really creating.

📣 Shout about your wins
If you don’t articulate your value, don’t expect anyone else to. Translate your leadership into business outcomes and repeat them as often as you can.

🧭 Step back without guilt
Your job is to create the conditions for your team to thrive, not to compete with them for outputs. Trusting your people to get the job done is the most productive thing you can do.

🏆 Redefine success
Stop measuring yourself by the pace of your team’s output. Measure yourself by the scale of impact your team achieves because of your leadership.

When you make this shift, the guilt doesn’t vanish overnight, but it stops being a weight and starts being a reminder that you’re levelling up.

Tristan Burns

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