The approval trap: you’ve got the title. Why doesn’t it feel like enough?

Sound leadership is making the work clearer, assigning genuine ownership, and giving your team the space to deliver and develop whilst you support them, writes Ndumi Hadebe

The promotion arrives with all the signals meant to make it feel real: the announcement, the new title, congratulations, a seat in more consequential meetings, a salary adjustment confirming this is no small move. For a moment, it feels great!

Suddenly you are expected to have a view on issues you have not yet had time to under-stand. The stakes are higher and you may now lead people who were once your peers - more authority, less direct control.

And privately, you may be asking a question you did not expect after getting what you worked so hard for: why does this not feel like enough? Why does it feel like something is missing?

It is not because you are ungrateful or in the wrong role. It may be because a promotion is treated as an arrival, when it is a transition. The title is awarded in a moment, yet becoming an impactful leader takes longer.

Senior leaders in South Africa frequently lead across generational differences, histories of hierarchy and exclusion, multilingual teams, uneven access to opportunity, transformation commitments, stretched resources, and in-tense expectations from boards, shareholders, employees, clients, and communities. These conditions demand more than technical ex-pertise - judgement, emotional range, cultural intelligence, clarity under pressure, and the ability to have difficult conversations without retreating into control, politeness or avoidance.

It's against this backdrop that fully stepping into a role becomes so demanding - a process grossly underrated by organisations that assume you'll simply plug in and quickly prove the right choice was made. A move into senior leadership is beyond a change in title: it requires new ways of thinking, deciding, and leading - a different relationship with your time, authority, and need to be seen as capable.

A South African study, Designing a Coaching Intervention to Support Leaders Promoted into Senior Positions, describes this as a difficult transition involving intrapersonal, interper-sonal, and systemic challenges - support, it finds, is usually introduced reactively, once the leader is already struggling.

The pressure to establish yourself pulls you back toward the behaviours that created your earlier success: doing too much, taking work back, solving before others have had time to think. Those habits got you noticed; in the new role, they become a constraint - not always a lack of effort, but often an excess of it.

This is a documented pattern. In her land-mark study of nineteen new managers, Harvard Business School's Linda Hill found that most did not privately feel like managers for months after their appointment. The real turning point came when they started to see themselves differently.

The approval trap is the silent, often subcon-scious pull to prove you deserve the role by doing more, knowing more, being needed more - when the role now requires you to lead differently.

At the level below, you were rewarded for personal output: the person who knew the work, met the deadline, rescued the project.

Reliability became your identity. Then you were promoted, and that identity is tested. A senior role asks you to create conditions in which work happens without your constant involvement - deciding with incomplete inform-ation, developing capability in others, knowing when not to be the one with the answer.

Approval is not always applause, sometimes it’s the satisfaction of saving the day at the last minute, or a stakeholder saying, “I knew I could count on you.” Over time, it becomes counter-productive for leadership. And very costly for managers at senior level.

When you have just moved into a more senior role, busyness can feel like evidence you are taking the responsibility seriously. Competing priorities, unfamiliar stakeholders, legacy is-sues you did not create - so you tell yourself the problem is simple: there is too much work.

Some of that may be true. But you may also be carrying work that no longer belongs to you: reviewing detail you could do faster yourself, answering questions your team could learn to answer, stepping in early so no one questions your judgement. This looks like commitment, whilst creating anxiety and overwhelm.

If every meaningful decision requires your involvement, you become the point at which

work slows down. Your team learns to wait for your response, your approval, your rescue - not because they lack ability, but because your behaviour has taught them that this is how work moves here.

The shift is not to lower your standards, but to distinguish what genuinely needs your authority from what needs clearer direction or a better structure - a role-identity shift from defining your value by what you per-sonally deliver, to defining it by what you enable in others.

Every repeated leadership behaviour becomes an instruction. If you take work back after del-egating it, and delegation becomes condi-tional. If you change decisions without in-volving the team members responsible, and they stop developing their own thinking. Mak-ing yourself the final approval point for everything stifles initiative.

Leadership scholars DeRue and Ashford describe this as claiming and granting: a leader must claim a new identity through behaviour, and the team grants it by trusting that behaviour enough to act on it. Keep claiming the old identity - indispensable doer, final checkpoint - and your team has no opening to grant you the new one, however senior your title.

The organisation may see a hard-working leader; the team may experience caution, dependency, and delay. Both can be true - one of the more uncomfortable realities of leadership: you judge yourself by intention, others experi-ence you through the patterns you repeat.

The approval trap is not solved by becoming less committed, but by becoming honest about what is driving your behaviour. Start with questioning the work that repeatedly finds its way back to you - that is often where the pat-tern is hiding.

During a transition, self-leadership may matter even more than leading others - the honesty to notice the identity you are trying to preserve and to ask what it’s costing you at this level.

Reflect on the following:

Before solving a problem, ask what options the person responsible has already considered. Be-fore saying yes to another task, ask whether it belongs to you.

The real shift begins with understanding that settling into a new role is more about how you see yourself than it is about how others see you. It’s that balance between fully embodying being a strategic leader and being a sturdy support structure for your team.

The title is not meant to complete you. It is an invitation to grow into a different kind of leadership - one in which your value is meas-ured not only by what you can personally deliver, but by what becomes possible through the people you lead.

Sound leadership is making the work clearer, assigning genuine ownership, and giving your team the space to deliver and develop whilst you support them.