There’s a peculiar kind of loss that comes with leadership in technical fields, and it’s one nobody warns you about. It’s not dramatic. There’s no goodbye party or farewell email. Instead, it’s gradual—like watching your reflection fade from a photograph.

For years, you knew exactly how you were doing. The numbers were there, glowing on your dashboard like a compass bearing true north. Tickets closed. CSAT scores ticked upward. Customers happy, problems solved, day complete. You could see your value. More than that, you could feel it—the immediate, tangible satisfaction of a problem dismantled, a frustrated customer transformed into a grateful one.

Then you stepped into leadership.

And the compass broke.

The Phantom Limb Syndrome

The first week is thrilling. You’ve got ambition, fresh authority, and a mental list of everything you’ll fix. By week three, something strange happens. You’re in meetings instead of solving tickets. You’re coaching someone else’s solution instead of building your own. You’re reading about CSAT rather than personally improving it.

And the voice whispers: What are you actually doing here?

It’s not cynicism. It’s genuine disorientation. The metrics that proved your worth have been amputated. You keep reaching for them instinctively, the way an amputee reaches for a cup with a phantom hand.

The cruel part? You were good at those metrics. Truly good. You had the muscle memory, the intuition, the track record. You had an identity built on delivering against those measures. And now that identity is unemployed whilst you’re supposedly promoted.

The Trap of Backwards Looking

So here’s where many of us stumble. We don’t consciously reject the new role—we just refuse to let go of the old one. We tell ourselves we’re “staying sharp” or “not losing touch” whilst actually we’re just trying to recapture that feeling of being objectively, measurably valuable.

The ticket you jumped in to solve? That was seductive. Your team probably even appreciated it. You felt useful in a way that sitting in a strategic planning meeting never quite manages.

But something insidious was happening. Whilst you were solving that one ticket, you were implicitly sending a message to your team: the tickets matter more than what I’m trying to build here. Worse, you were robbing them of the problem-solving opportunity. And most dangerously, you were avoiding the actual, harder work of leadership—the work with no clear dashboard, no CSAT score, no ticket count to validate your efforts.

The irony is brutal: by chasing the metrics that made you successful, you were making yourself useless in the role you’d actually stepped into.

The Unmeasured Thing

Leadership in support operates in a different economy entirely, and that’s what makes it terrifying. Your new measures of success aren’t visible on a screen. They’re qualitative, delayed, often invisible.

Did your coaching conversation shift how someone thinks about customer problems? You won’t know for six months. Did your decision to hire differently change your team’s culture? You might never fully see it, but the people who work for you will feel it. Did your clarity in a difficult decision build trust? It compounds quietly, manifesting as things that don’t happen—resignations that never occur, escalations that don’t materialise, conflicts that never fester.

These aren’t metrics. They’re ghosts. And if you’re the type of person who became excellent at solving tickets, you’re probably not the type who finds ghosts particularly comforting.

Yet this is the actual work. Not the ghost of your technical brilliance haunting your calendar, but something genuinely different: building the capacity for your team to solve problems without you. Creating psychological safety so they take risks. Making decisions that serve the organisation’s direction rather than today’s ticket queue. Developing people. Shaping culture.

The Reorientation

The hardest part isn’t accepting that these new measures exist. It’s accepting that you might not be excellent at them immediately. You were excellent at tickets. You weren’t excellent at leadership by accident—you’ll need to actually learn it.

This is why so many talented technical people stumble in leadership roles. Not because they can’t do it, but because they can’t do it and feel good about it immediately. There’s no dopamine hit from closing a ticket. There’s no scorecard showing you’re winning.

But here’s the truth worth sitting with: if you’re still measuring yourself by your technical output as a leader, you’ve fundamentally failed at the transition. Not because you’re not solving problems—you are. But you’re solving the wrong ones.

The measure of your success isn’t how many tickets you personally closed. It’s whether your team is more capable, more confident, and more thoughtful than they were when you arrived. It’s whether decisions are being made without you needing to weigh in. It’s whether your people are growing.

Finding Your Bearing Again

The compass doesn’t break. It just points toward something else now. Something without numbers.

You’ll spend the first year reaching for the phantom metrics, and that’s okay. The grief is real. That identity served you well. But it was also serving you as a shield—protecting you from the vulnerability of learning something new, of being novice again, of being measured against standards you can’t immediately master.

The strange liberation that comes, though, arrives quietly. One day you realise you haven’t thought about your personal CSAT score in months. You notice you’ve got a team of people who make better decisions than they used to. You see someone you coached handling a difficult customer beautifully—not your way, their way. And you realise that’s not a loss of your impact. It’s the realisation of it.

You’re not the technical problem solver anymore. You never will be again in quite that way. The tickets will always be there, and there will always be moments when you’re tempted to jump in, to feel that old satisfaction one more time.

But you’ve been building something more fragile and more valuable: people. Capability. Trust. Culture.

The dashboard won’t show it. Your email won’t celebrate it. But in five years, you’ll look back and realise that’s what actually mattered all along.

Ships are built for more than harbour. And so are leaders.