“We thought you knew.”
They didn’t say it out loud. They rarely do. But the silence was there, humming beneath every meeting invite, every handoff, every task that didn’t come with any context.
This is what happens when invisible expectations collide with undefined roles. When accountability shifts but no one updates the map. When leadership is treated not as a transition, but as osmosis.
I’ve been living this firsthand.
I’ve held a senior title for a while now. But only recently did I start to realize that the job I thought I was doing wasn’t actually the job people expected from me.
There wasn’t a new job description, or some re-org. Just… a misalignment. A slow, unspoken shift of expectation from tactical execution to strategic ownership—without any awareness on my part. I was still measuring myself by the markers that had always meant I was doing a good job – speed, responsiveness, and deep technical contribution. Meanwhile, leadership above and around me had started measuring me by influence, synthesis, and how effectively I shaped outcomes I didn’t directly control.
And when I didn’t deliver on those expectations—expectations I didn’t even know existed—I could feel the dissonance. The feedback grew vaguer. The asks got bigger. The room got colder.
It took me longer than I’d like to see the pattern.
This wasn’t about performance. It was about alignment—and the way most organizations completely fail to manage the shift from individual contribution to organizational stewardship.
The Myth of the Seamless Transition
We like to pretend that leadership is just “more of the same, but higher up.” That if someone excels in the trenches, they’ll naturally rise to strategy. That with enough time and exposure, people will just… figure it out.
But here’s what no one says out loud:
The skillset doesn’t translate on its own. And the job changes even when the title doesn’t.
A lot of neurodivergent professionals—and, frankly, a lot of high-performing leaders in general—get tripped up here. Especially if we’ve built trust by being reliable doers, fixers, or technical experts. That’s what earned us the role in the first place. But suddenly that mode of operating isn’t just less effective—it’s often seen as a red flag.
What looks like “ownership” at one level starts to look like “control” or “micromanagement” at the next. What used to be strengths—responsiveness, hyper-focus, hands-on problem solving—now risk being interpreted as not strategic enough, too in the weeds, or unable to scale.
And no one teaches us this.
“Isn’t That Someone Else’s Job?”
This is where it gets uncomfortable—especially for neurodivergent leaders or those of us who didn’t have traditional mentorship paths.
Maybe you grew up thinking the tech lead owns architecture, the PM owns the problem space, and you just keep things humming. But real leadership overlaps those roles, on purpose. Because the highest-leverage thing you can do is steer the whole ship toward the right destination.
Leadership is overlapping on purpose. Product managers, tech leads, architects, and senior engineering managers are all supposed to co-own strategy. But you’re still accountable.
If you’re not choosing the right problems, aligning stakeholders, or helping frame outcomes, your team’s work may be fast and clean—but totally ineffective. And that’s worse than a missed deadline.
Speed doesn’t matter if you’re sprinting in the wrong direction.
Systemic Failure, Not Personal Flaw
This isn’t just a personal growth story. It’s a systems problem.
Most organizations don’t have clear mechanisms for re-onboarding leaders when expectations shift. We rarely create spaces for leaders to recalibrate their approach—or even name the fact that their jobs have changed. The assumption is that if you’re senior, you already know what you’re supposed to be doing. But the truth is, you’re often dropped into a set of invisible norms and judged by how well you navigate them without guidance.
It’s onboarding by osmosis. Training by silence. Evaluation by vibe.
And the cost is high:
- Leaders burn out trying to meet expectations no one said out loud.
- Teams suffer from misaligned direction.
- Organizations quietly lose potential because they never clarified the damn job.
What To Do If You’re Stuck in the Gap
If this is hitting a little too close to home, good. That means you’ve got the awareness many people don’t.
Here’s where to start:
- Ask better questions. Not “What’s the priority?” but “Are we solving the right thing, the right way?”
- Surface problems bottom-up. Your team sees things execs don’t. Your job is to make those visible.
- Write the plan no one asked for. Share your thinking—roadmaps, alignment docs, options analysis. Don’t wait for permission.
- Close your fluency gaps. Learn the product. Read the code. Write one architecture doc. Show your team you understand their world, even if you don’t live there daily.
- Talk to your manager. Ask: “Where do you see me stepping up? Where am I invisible?”
And most importantly: don’t confuse silence for success. If no one’s correcting you, it may be because they’ve already written you off.
What Would It Look Like to Fix This?
Imagine a world where senior transitions were treated as real transitions. Where stepping into a new leadership mode came with structured reflection, clear shifts in accountability, and even coaching or mentorship—not as a sign of failure, but as a natural evolution.
Where expectations were made visible.
Where strengths didn’t become liabilities just because the context changed.
Where alignment wasn’t left to chance or charisma.
Until then, it’s on us—especially those of us who’ve lived through the confusion—to say what wasn’t said. To ask the unasked questions. And when needed, to rewrite the invisible expectations in plain text.
You Were Never Really Taught This
You didn’t miss a memo. You were never given one.
The system wasn’t designed to train you for leadership. It was designed to extract reliability from you. And when you aged out of that lane—when you were too senior to just follow instructions—it didn’t suddenly become supportive. It became vague, quiet, and full of expectations no one would say out loud.
If you’re neurodivergent, nontraditional, or just not well-networked, the odds are even higher that you hit this ceiling confused, exhausted, and convinced it’s your fault.
It’s not.
But it is your responsibility now.
Leadership starts when you stop waiting for the right instructions—and start shaping the right problems.
TL;DR
- We need better systems to onboard and support leaders through these invisible transitions.
- Invisible expectations and unstated assumptions are a systemic failure, not a personal one.
- Leadership transitions are often treated as invisible or automatic, especially at senior levels.
- If you’re struggling to “do the job,” check whether the job you’re doing is the one people are evaluating.
