You’ve been promoted to a new leadership level with greater scope and responsibility than ever before, including a larger team and expectations to set the vision and strategy. Within months, your boss says, "You need to delegate more. Stop doing all the technical work yourself."

You agree and really want to delegate more. But six months later, you’re working most nights and weekends, still doing work from your old role while also doing your new leadership work.

You’ve become the bottleneck for all initiatives. Your team has become increasingly frustrated waiting for your reviews and approvals of the work. And your boss repeats the feedback at your mid-year review: "You’re still operating like an individual contributor instead of a higher-level leader who can delegate."

You check in with your mentor, your coach, your best friend, your partner, your peers: Everyone offers the same advice: Just delegate. Just let go.

If only it were that simple.

The Hidden Double Bind

Most advice misses the double bind for women in leadership: They are promoted because of very traits that are now being reframed as liabilities. For example:

• Women are socialized to be collaborative, consensus-building, and team-oriented. When promoted, those traits become "too consensus-driven" and "not decisive."
• Women are socialized to be responsive and accommodating. When promoted, this becomes "not strategic enough"—because setting boundaries, saying no, or prioritizing some things over others induces (socialized) guilt.
• Women are applauded for the invisible emotional labor of managing team conflict. When promoted, they’re expected to continue doing that while also making hard decisions and engaging in productive conflict.
• Women learn they must work twice as hard to be recognized—and those with additional marginalized identities must work even harder. When promoted, they continue to work twice as hard to prove themselves, only to be admonished for trying to do it all.
• Women are scrutinized more when something goes wrong, which can lead many to become perfectionistic and detail-oriented in their work. When promoted, this translates into fear that if they don’t personally review everything, they’ll ultimately be blamed.

The message to "delegate more" is too simplistic for the contradictory expectations women must navigate.

What’s Really Happening: A Multilevel Problem

I work with many women leaders stuck in this exact trap. The solution starts with first diagnosing the true complexity of the problem across multiple levels:

• Individual level: All leaders need to develop new capabilities as they move into more senior roles, including delegation, supervision skills, and strategic thinking. The important questions to ask are: What part is a skill that was never taught, and what part is about individual personality, work preferences, and personal traits? Women are often under-invested in as leaders, receiving less mentorship, sponsorship, and decision-making opportunities than their male peers. In addition, they are often scrutinized more harshly for assertiveness (misperceived as aggressive) or carefulness (misperceived as a lack of confidence).
• Team level: A promoted leader’s team doesn’t automatically develop the competence to fully take over. They’ll initially make more mistakes and move more slowly. Clear processes for systematic development are needed. But for women, simply trying to "ensure standards" can be misperceived as micromanaging—and that fear can cause them to avoid delegating altogether.
• Organizational level: When a leader is promoted, their supervisors should help them identify which workload will shift, a timeline for onboarding, resources for leadership development during onboarding (including addressing missed opportunities due to structural inequities), and structures that enable successful delegation. Most of the time, the only thing that changes is the title. And yet, most women will blame themselves for the resulting failures rather than recognizing the systemic gap.
• **Social conditioning level: **Women are socialized to believe their value comes from being indispensable: from always saying yes and not burdening others with their work and development needs. When promoted, they must somehow now "just" operate differently, without time to process the identity shift, reconstruct what makes them valuable, and, importantly, often without a blueprint for how to do this. They must immediately identify and navigate the system’s unspoken rules (the invisible architecture), including who has influence, the weight of the organization’s history, and how decisions are made beyond what’s written.

What Actually Works

For organizational leaders hoping to change this dynamic:

1. Make the invisible visible. Share who the influencers are, how decisions are actually made, how people are evaluated, how success is measured, and the many other unspoken rules.
2. Create a thoughtful transition and onboarding plan with systemic support, including sufficient leadership development training and coaching, sponsorship, mentorship, time to train team members, and realistic timelines**.**
3. Build delegation capacity gradually. Work together to delegate one thing at a time, evaluate and adjust, then move on to the next thing.

For women navigating** **the expert-to-leader transition, remember that if you are finding it challenging to delegate, it might not be that simple. Consider these guiding reflections:

1. Is there anything you need to unlearn that you were previously rewarded for?
2. Are you navigating contradictory expectations?
3. Are there systems in place that do not support a smooth transition?
4. Are you shifting into a new identity of your role and career that you need time and support to understand, define, and embody?
5. Are there invisible dynamics shaping your success that you need help clarifying or making more visible?

Once you can see it as a multilevel challenge within a complex system, there is greater strategic clarity about what’s actually yours to change (individual level), what needs to change at other levels, and how to identify and navigate any hidden dynamics that could work against true success.

*This content was originally explored in the broader "Strategic Clarity" series on The Hard Skills podcast, which can be found on any podcast platform or on YouTube at *https://www.youtube.com/@DrMiraBrancu