Every commercial director I've placed got there the same way. They were the person everyone went to when a job was on fire. Contract dispute, subcontractor claim, cash flow gap on a live programme, they had the answer, fast, and it was usually right. That's what earned the promotion.

It's also what will undo them if they don't drop it within the first year.

The pattern I see most often when a first-time director starts to struggle isn't a skills gap. It's the opposite. They're still doing the thing they're best at, giving the answer, and the team has quietly learned to bring them problems instead of solving them. Six months in, the director is busier than ever, exhausted, still brilliant technically, and privately wondering why a team of capable QSs can't seem to make a decision without them.

They can't, because nobody's let them.

Every time you solve a problem someone brought to you, you've taught them two things: that you're faster than they are, and that bringing it to you is easier than working it out themselves. Both are true. Neither helps you. A team that has learned this will keep bringing you everything, forever, and you'll keep confirming that the shortcut works.

The uncomfortable fix is to get slower on purpose. When someone brings you a problem, the job isn't to solve it, it's to ask what they'd do, and then live with an answer that's 80 percent as good as yours would have been. That 20 percent gap is the price of a team that can function without you in the room. Most new directors won't pay it, because it feels like a drop in standards, and because giving the fast right answer is the identity they've built a whole career on.

I'd go further. If you can't name three decisions your team made last month without you, you haven't started delegating, you've just been generous with your time.

This is harder than it sounds because nobody tells you the promotion changes the job this much. You were hired to be the smartest person on the numbers. You're now being asked to make yourself less necessary, on purpose, while still being accountable for everything that goes wrong. It's a strange trade, and the QSs who make it well are the ones who stop measuring their week by how many fires they put out and start measuring it by how many their team put out without them.

If you're six months into a director role and you're still the fastest answer in the room on everything, that's not a compliment. Look at your calendar this week. Count how many meetings you were in because someone needed a decision only you could make, versus one you'd already handed off. If the first number is higher, you know where to start.