👔 Smart, hardworking people don’t necessarily make the best leaders — and many high-performing employees-turned-leaders only realize this after stepping into the role. Being a leader often means being put on a pedestal and expected to excel at everything from decision-making to sheer workload capacity. But the reality is this: leadership is less about skill and more about shifting mindsets; less about how much you do and more about how you do it.

Why leaders burn out

You’re a newly promoted manager, and burnout already feels dangerously close — why? It’s not the workload or the number of decisions you need to make. It’s the reality that leaders absorb their teams’ fallout points and what Forbes calls “unclear ownership.” That pressure adds up, and Harvard Business reports burnout hits 85% of mid-level leaders on a weekly basis. A Deloitte report also backs this up, finding that 53% of managers admit they suffer from burnout at work.

The overload starts slowly. An unclear task lands on your desk, a vague expectation prompts yet another follow-up conversation, and a crossed boundary becomes your responsibility. Soon enough, work becomes fragmented, and you’re the glue holding everything together — often not by choice. Every unassigned task becomes a tiring dilemma: “Do it myself, or take time I don’t have to explain it?”

A team of top-performers can still fall apart, and the culprit is often muddled ownership. When people don’t own their decisions, disengagement easily follows. The solution is to make the necessary shift from implicit to explicit ownership, Forbes writes. Let your team make decisions independently rather than waiting for approval.

Shifting the leadership mindset

So, why is this shift difficult to adopt, especially for talented, high-performing leaders? Despite an annual investment ofUSD 366 bn in the leadership development industry, 40% of managers still fail or are moved aside within 18 months of promotion. For smart leaders, the struggle to lead — and the inability to step back — is rooted less in a skills gap than in how our brains are wired.

An identity founded on personal delivery and individual contribution suddenly expands into team outcomes. This is where most executives find themselves trapped, unconsciously operating from what Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan calls the “socialized mind” — a reactive mindset that relies on external validation as the “fixer” or the “doer” for self-worth — a mindset that no longer serves a purpose. And it’s more common than you’d think: research from Leadership Circle estimates that 75% of leaders primarily operate on this socialized mindset.

When tensions rise, internal conflict sets in for leaders who haven’t yet tapped into their internal authority, or what Kegan calls “the self-authoring mind.” This self-authoring mindset enables leaders to access more future-oriented, proactive thought processes. A self-generated purpose shifts your sense of self toward an internal value system, relying less on validation from work done by one’s own hands. Research indicates, however, that only 15% of leaders have been able to adopt this mindset.

This is why urging a manager to try harder is ineffective — under pressure, they will instinctively default to the reactive habits they’ve spent years perfecting. Moving toward a self-authoring mindset isn’t just a skill upgrade; it’s vertical development. It requires shifting the very way a leader defines their value and relates to their team. This growth occurs only when a leader’s challenges exceed their current mental map, forcing them to dismantle old assumptions to make room for a more advanced perspective. In short: the process is challenging, but it is necessary.

How Egypt’s entrepreneurs approach leadership

These global shifts in mindset are echoed by Egypt’s leaders. As with many things in life, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership, but it starts with shifting your mindset and recognizing that you can’t — and shouldn’t — do everything yourself. For B.Tech’s Mahmoud Khattab, “It’s very important to criticize your own thinking and decisions all the time, but not to the extent that it hinders you,” noting that while leaders need to hold themselves accountable, delegation is key. Peace Cake’s Kareem Abou Gamrah also emphasizes the importance of clear ownership and its impact on one’s ability to lead: “If there is no ‘this is where this person’s job ends, and this is where this person’s job begins,’ it causes leakages.”