The Shift from DOER to ENABLER – The Corporate Bite

How do I derive satisfaction from other people’s achievements?

Often, for first-time managers, there’s a disconnect between how things used to be done before this transition and how things are supposed to be done now. We see them struggling to understand why the exact same thing that used to work just a few months back is now so inefficient. In part, this has to do with the Doer to Enabler effect.

When you make this commitment and decide it’s time to step into leadership shoes, a more interesting, yet very impactful shift needs to happen: moving away from “I’ll just manage on my own” to “let me see how we can all do this together.” Some don’t even think about this too much and just assume that success will continue to come as long as they keep doing what they know best: punch those numbers and just soldier through it like always. In reality, this is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

If you are struggling to balance out the way things happened before and the way they should happen now, or if it’s hard to fully understand why all the effort you are putting in now is not really working… this article is for you. In it, we will go over the following aspects:

The Mindset Trap: Why Transitions Are Painful
Redefining Success
3 Steps to Let Go of Pride
Shifting Your Internal Reward System
Final Thoughts

Part I. The Mindset Trap: Why Transitions Are Painful

Why is it painful when we move from an individual contributor role to a leadership one? What is so hard about it anyway? After all, you are the best one for the job, right? You feel ready, you act ready, and people believe you are ready. What’s the problem?

To understand this aspect, we need to go back (just a little) in time. It’s now 6 months ago: the sun is up, birds are singing, the office air has a faint aroma of coffee, and your task list is full. Your dedication is high, so you start crunching those numbers, doing those reports, and sending tons of emails. Before you know it, the list is done and you have 10 minutes to relax.

As an individual contributor, you are thinking a lot in terms of items: how many I have on my list and how fast I can do them. This creates a reward system in your brain based on “ticking off the list” items: each time you check one of them off, your brain gives you a lovely reward as a “feel good” moment. This is the “Doer” in you, the part that responds very well to task-based performance. Doers are naturally wired to get gratification very often; it’s just the way they look at things and how they function.

Managers, on the other hand, are not wired this way, hence the big dilemma: why am I not getting the same reward? Well, the output of managers drops to zero immediately. You no longer have any direct impact on the quality and/or quantity of work: it’s all about what the team is doing now. This triggers a sentiment of despair and confusion for the first-time lead.

To stop this, you need to stop thinking in terms of tasks completed. Your job now is to grow, nurture, and help your team become that excellent individual contributor you know from the past.

Your new arch-nemesis is pride! This is that little devil in the back of your mind that keeps telling you, “Do it yourself, it’s faster.” This mentality will hinder any growth the team should experience by creating a bottleneck: all these tasks come to you, and instead of teaching others how to do them as effectively as you can… you do them on your own, so they never learn.

Part II. Redefining Success.

We spoke a bit on this topic in What to do in your first 30 days: A Survival Checklist. Here, I want to elaborate a bit about the topic itself: how to redefine your success.

You see, when we talk about the Doer’s success, we talk about a simple formula: Success = 1 X Your Effort. It’s a basic concept: what effort you put into something is your success.

The Enabler, however, has a different formula when it comes to defining success: Enabler Output = Sum of Teams Capabilities X Context. This means you are no longer in charge – per se – of the effort, because it’s up to the team, meaning what they are capable of doing in a provided context. If you don’t grow them, if you don’t teach them – basically, if you don’t invest in them and prepare them, they will fail in the provided context.

Let’s say you have a high volume of very complex customer issues: instead of doing them yourself as the SOLE EXPERT, have power-training sessions with the team and teach them how to manage them. This way, you let them handle more complex aspects, create room for growth, and stabilize the process by having more than one person with the knowledge.

The shift here goes from “What I can do today” to “What the team can do tomorrow without you.” In my early years of management, I was told by someone I respect and admire a lot that I will know when my job is done: it’s the day the team can function fully in my absence. That one stuck with me over the years and influenced me when it comes to defining success as a leader.

It’s also a simple calculation you can think about: a 10% increase in your team’s capability yields vastly more value than working 20% harder on individual tasks. This is because you are one person and the team outnumbers you by at least 10:1. It stands to reason, then, that teaching 10 people to do a task is way more efficient than having one person doing it.

Part III. 3 Steps to Let Go of Pride

I was saying above that your new arch-nemesis is pride. So how do we manage this, and how do you make sure, as a first-time manager, it will not stand in your way? Can we control it? What can we do? It’s not like people change overnight, and you are right – we don’t. But we can take a more Kaizen approach to this. Here are 3 simple steps you can take to let go of that pride:

Audit Your Calendar: Identify high-volume, low-leverage tasks you are keeping solely because you enjoy them or trust only yourself to do them. Start pushing them to your team. You don’t have to do it all in one go; just do 10% each day (10% today, 20% tomorrow, and so on).
Separate ‘What’ from ‘How’: Set clear expected outcomes (SLAs, standards, goals), but give your team full ownership over the execution path. If there’s one thing people really hate, it’s micromanagement: all the effort you put into growing your team flies out the window the moment they no longer have any control over the execution. Let them experiment and think for themselves. You don’t need to stand over them all day long. Trust people!
Reframe Delegation: View delegating not as “handing off work,” but as assigning ownership and skill-building opportunities. The way you view delegation makes all the difference. It’s not about giving people work; in reality, it is about trusting people to step up and grow organically.

Part IV. Shifting Your Internal Reward System

The second-largest amount of work you will have to put into this transition will be your internal reward system. This is the way you view tasks and how your brain deals with them. As a Doer, you get a “brain reward” each time a task is completed, a sort of “ahh, well done me for completing this.” This goes away now, and you are left feeling a bit empty from this point of view. This is why you need to start working on how to change this and adapt it to the new job.

One thing you can do is start tracking aspects that measure team effort instead of tasks, like:

How many blockers were removed from the team?
How many decisions have been made autonomously by the team?
How many team members have stepped up to handle more complex things?

When you move from task-based to team-effort-based tracking, it makes it easier to cope with the new way of working.

Another thing would be to find joy in the invisible work. Make it your goal to coach these people until they are exactly where you want them to be. Make plans, workshops, and training; create materials and templates for them; show them how to do other things – anything, really, that can move you from the taskmaster to the less visible person behind the team.

A much harder thing to do for some people is the sharing of recognition. Unfortunately, I have experienced this many times over the years: bosses just take credit for your work and leave you there as someone from a team who maybe helped a bit. This, my friends, is the biggest no-no in management. While it might feel like you should be entitled to get the recognition since you are the one investing time in your team, you need to let them shine and promote them – not you, THEM.

Did you do great work on a project where the team had ownership and managed to handle it? Great, now tell upper management that and put your team first: “Guys, this is the effort of my team. They managed to achieve this, and I am very proud of them for all the hard work and effort they put into this.” Your job is not to get credit; it’s about how to increase the credit your team gets. I know it doesn’t always feel fair, but this is what it means to be a Leader.

Final Thoughts

While the entire transition from individual contributor to leader appears to be a much more complex journey than you might have assumed at first, if you are truly passionate about it, the rewards you get at the end are far greater than you can imagine. There’s no greater joy than looking at your team after 1–3 years of hard work and realizing how much they have grown, or meeting someone you coached who is now in a much better role, and they remember and thank you for that. These are the rewards you should be looking for now.

Along the path of transformation, you will, of course, be tempted to just give in and regress. Here are some studies that might help you change your mind if that time comes:

33% Higher Revenue: A study by Gallup evaluating executive leadership styles found that leaders who excel at delegating and empowering their teams generate 33% higher revenue than those who remain bogged down in execution. The Reason: Leaders who delegate free up capacity for strategic growth and decision-making, whereas “doer managers” cap their organization’s growth at their own personal output limit.
Only 19% Have Strong Delegation Skills: Global research by DDI (Development Dimensions International) analyzing over 70,000 leadership candidates found that only 19% demonstrated strong delegation capabilities. The Transition Trap: More than 4 out of 5 new leaders enter management roles attempting to operate with the same “execution-first” habits that got them promoted, leading to widespread inefficiency.
70% Variance in Team Engagement: According to Gallup, a manager’s leadership approach accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across teams.
The Cost of Micromanagement: Studies show that 79% of employees have experienced micromanagement—a direct byproduct of a manager who hasn’t let go of tactical control. Furthermore, 85% of micromanaged employees report a steep drop in morale and autonomy.

Until the next article, stay safe, stay healthy, and help others as much and as often as you can!