From manager to director: why the step up is bigger than you expected
David Buirs is an executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article describes the six biggest challenges in the transition from manager to director: letting go, strategic thinking, operating through others, navigating uncertainty, and the gradual disappearance of honest feedback. It explains how executive coaching helps make this transition effective.
You had been thinking about this moment for years. You knew what would be expected of you. You had watched it up close.
And yet. The first months as a director felt different from what you had imagined.
Not worse, necessarily. But unfamiliar. As if the rules of the game had changed and nobody had told you.
They had.
Research by IMD, based on interviews with 1,350 HR professionals, shows that leadership transitions are the most difficult moments in a leader's professional life. Not the hardest projects. Not the most complex reorganisations. The transition itself.
These are the six things new directors most commonly run into.
1. What got you here will not get you there
As a manager, you won by knowing. By doing. By solving problems before they escalated.
That behaviour made you successful. At director level, it becomes your biggest liability.
A director who keeps operating like a manager stays too close to the content. Makes decisions their managers should have made themselves. Without meaning to, builds a team that looks to them for answers instead of thinking independently.
The transition demands something that feels almost unnatural: letting go. Precisely when everything is new and uncertain.
2. You are now paid to think, not to do
As a manager, your day was full. Meetings, decisions, fires, people. At the end of the day, you had done something.
As a director, your calendar might look similar. But the real value you deliver lives somewhere else. In the quality of your thinking. In the questions you ask your managers. In the direction you set.
That takes adjusting to. Productivity feels less tangible. It becomes harder to point to what you actually accomplished.
And so many new directors drift back into operations. Not out of stubbornness. Out of habit. Because it feels familiar.
3. Most strategies are not a strategy
At director level, strategy suddenly becomes your responsibility. And that is precisely where many leaders struggle.
Because what most organisations call a strategy is actually a list of goals. Higher revenue. Better retention. More market share. Worthy ambitions. But not a strategy.
A real strategy is something different. It is a creative and smart choice about how to deploy people and resources to bridge the biggest obstacles standing between you and those goals. It defines what you will not do. It makes choices that hurt.
That requires a way of thinking most managers have never had to develop. Not because they are incapable of it, but because it was never asked of them.
4. Your influence now works through others
As a manager, you had a team. You knew who was good at what. You could course-correct, coach, step in.
As a director, you work largely through your managers. Your impact has become indirect. Your weekly one-on-ones with your managers are now where most of the real work actually happens.
That is a fundamentally different way of creating impact. And outside your own department it becomes more complex still. You need results through people who do not report to you. That requires alliances, trust, political awareness. Skills you were barely assessed on in your previous role.
5. There is no handbook anymore
As a manager, there was always a framework. A strategy from above. Goals that had been set. A leader you could consult.
As a director, you are that framework for others. You help set the direction. You answer questions that you do not always know the answer to yourself.
That requires something few people have explicitly learned: being comfortable with uncertainty. Making decisions on incomplete information. Holding course while the situation keeps changing.
And doing all of that while appearing calm and clear to your team. Because your uncertainty is felt by others. They look to you for direction. Even when you are still figuring it out yourself.
6. Honest feedback dries up
As a manager, you still received reasonably honest feedback. From your own leader, from colleagues, sometimes from your team.
At director level, that largely stops. People filter. They say what they think you want to hear. Or they stay silent. You hear less and less about what is actually happening.
You gradually build a distorted picture of how you are functioning, how you come across, where your blind spots are. Without realising it.
Why this is the moment to find a thinking partner
These are not personal failings. This is the transition. Anyone who is honest about their first years as a director will recognise something in this list.
But recognition alone does not solve it.
Because all of these challenges have something in common: they are difficult to resolve from the inside. You are too close. You have too little honest feedback. You are missing someone who asks the questions you are not asking yourself, because you are in the middle of it.
That is exactly where executive coaching makes the difference.
Not as therapy. Not as a course in strategic thinking. But as a fixed, confidential space with someone who understands the territory. Someone who helps you let go of the right things. Who keeps you honest about your blind spots. Who thinks alongside you on the questions you cannot raise inside the organisation.
Whether it is learning to step back from operations, building a real strategy, navigating complex stakeholder dynamics, or simply finding steadiness in a role that demands a great deal from you. In a coaching engagement, you work on the concrete situations that are live right now. Not abstract leadership theory.
The difference between who gets stuck in this transition and who grows through it rarely comes down to talent. It comes down to whether you have someone helping you ask the right questions at the moment it matters most.
For organisations looking to develop leaders across multiple levels, an in-company leadership program is a logical next step.
Have you recently stepped into a director role, or are you about to? Plan a free introductory conversation. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are now and what you need.