I’ve fallen into this trap more than once. You get promoted, you take on the new responsibilities, and you keep doing the old ones too. Not because anyone asked you to, but because the old work is familiar, you’re good at it, and there’s a voice in your head saying “if I don’t do this, it won’t get done right.”

That voice is wrong. Or rather, it might be right in the short term, but it’s catastrophically wrong in the medium term. Doing two jobs doesn’t make you indispensable, it makes you a bottleneck, and it prevents your team from growing into the space you’re supposed to have vacated.

Why We Hold On

The reasons are mostly emotional, even when we dress them up as practical.

Competence feels good. Your old job is something you’re demonstrably good at. Your new job is something you’re still figuring out. Given the choice between feeling competent and feeling uncertain, most of us gravitate toward competence. So we keep doing the thing we know how to do, and we tell ourselves we’re being responsible.

The team isn’t ready. This is the most common justification, and it’s sometimes true, but far less often than we think. Kambil’s research on executive transitions found that internally promoted leaders consistently overestimate the quality of their inherited team, precisely because they’re too busy compensating for gaps themselves. You can’t assess whether your team can handle the work if you never give them the chance to try.

Nobody asked you to stop. In many organisations, the handover is implicit rather than explicit. You get the new title, but nobody takes the old responsibilities away. So you keep doing both, and the organisation adjusts to having you in two roles rather than forcing the transition.

Letting go feels like abandonment. If you built something, a system, a process, a team dynamic, handing it to someone else can feel like abandoning your creation. There’s an ownership instinct that’s hard to override, especially when you can see ways the new person would do it differently.

The Cost

The cost of doing two jobs is higher than most people realise, because it’s distributed across the whole team rather than concentrated on you.

You become the bottleneck. Decisions wait for you. Reviews wait for you. Questions wait for you. The team learns that the fastest way to get something done is to route it through you, which means nothing moves when you’re in meetings, on holiday, or simply overwhelmed.

Your team doesn’t grow. Every task you hold onto is a development opportunity you’re denying someone else. The engineer who could have learned to make architectural decisions doesn’t get the chance because you’re still making them. The team lead who could have owned the relationship with product doesn’t develop that skill because you’re still in every meeting.

Your new job suffers. The strategic work, the people development, the stakeholder management, these are the things that only you can do in your new role, and they’re the first things to slip when you’re spending half your time on your old responsibilities. The irony is that the work you’re holding onto is work someone else could do, while the work you’re neglecting is work nobody else can do.

You burn out. Two jobs means two jobs’ worth of cognitive load, context-switching, and emotional labour. It’s not sustainable, and the quality of both roles degrades as your energy depletes.

Making the Clean Break

The transition doesn’t happen overnight, but it needs to happen deliberately. Here’s what’s worked for me:

Name a successor explicitly. Don’t just drift away from your old responsibilities, hand them to a specific person with a clear timeline. “You’re taking over the technical architecture decisions for this system. For the next two weeks, I’ll be available to consult, but the decisions are yours.”

Accept that things will be different. Your successor will do things differently than you would. Some of those differences will be improvements. Some won’t. Unless something is genuinely going wrong, resist the urge to intervene. The short-term quality dip is the price of long-term team capability.

Set a hard deadline. Give yourself a date by which you will no longer be involved in your old responsibilities. Put it in your calendar. Tell people about it. Make it real.

Remove yourself from the information flow. If you’re still CC’d on every email, still in every Slack channel, still attending every standup for your old team, you haven’t actually let go. You’re just doing two jobs with the illusion of having transitioned.

Check in on your new role. Ask yourself honestly: am I spending the majority of my time on the responsibilities of my new role? If the answer is no, something needs to change, and that something is almost certainly you.

The Six-Month Test

Kambil suggests that executives should aim to have high confidence in 70-80% of their direct reports by the end of their first year. I think a simpler test works for the “two jobs” problem: six months after your transition, could you go on a two-week holiday without your old responsibilities suffering?

If the answer is yes, you’ve successfully transitioned. If the answer is no, you’re still doing two jobs, and you need to figure out what you’re holding onto and why.

The hardest part isn’t the logistics. It’s the identity shift. Letting go of your old role means accepting that you’re no longer the person who does that work. You’re the person who makes sure that work gets done well by someone else. That’s a different kind of contribution, and it takes time to feel like enough.

But it is enough. In fact, it’s more.