What if someone on my team is better at the job than I am?

You got promoted because you were brilliant at the work. Now you're managing someone who's even better at it than you were...

You got promoted because you were brilliant at the work. Now you’re managing someone who’s even better at it than you were and instead of feeling proud, you feel like a fraud.

Welcome to the expert trap - the one nobody warns you about when they promote you. For years, your value came from being the best, from being the go-to person with all the answers. Then overnight, your job changes, but nobody explains that your value needs to shift with it too.

So there you are, watching someone absolutely nail that presentation you would have done yourself this time last year. And instead of celebrating their success, you’re mentally calculating how long until everyone realises they might just have promoted the wrong person.

Having someone better than you on your team isn’t a threat though. It’s the entire point of leading.

Your job isn’t to be the best at everything anymore. Your job is to enable the best in everyone else. Think about it for a moment. A mediocre manager with a brilliant team will always beat a brilliant manager with a mediocre team every single time. Problem is that most organisations don’t ever bother to explain this shift. They promote you for technical excellence then leave you drowning when the rules change and everything feels off.

So what do you do? It’s time to stop competing and start enabling.

When they nail that presentation, don’t think “I could have done that better.” Think about how you can get them in front of the right people. When someone solves a problem you’re stuck on, don’t jump to minimising their contribution. Ask them to teach you their approach.

Your new metrics aren’t about your individual brilliance anymore. They’re about what your team delivers that they couldn’t before, who’s growing because of your support, which barriers you’ve removed for them. It’s a completely different way of measuring success, and it can feel deeply uncomfortable at first.

The shift goes something like this: “I need to be the expert” becomes “I need to build experts.” Instead of worrying they’ll realise you don’t know everything, you start learning from your team. Rather than feeling you should have all the answers, you focus on asking way better questions.

This week try something different. Find the person on your team who’s better than you at something specific. Tell them you think they’re brilliant at it and why and that you’d love to learn from them. Then actually listen. Not speaking just listening.

Because the managers who build the best teams aren’t threatened by brilliance. They seek it out and collect it.