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A Squirrel Cannot Be like a Giraffe, and a Giraffe Cannot Be like a Squirrel
Leadership
Coaching
Career
November 12, 2025
A promotion in a company is usually associated with leadership responsibilities. However, leading employees is, in many ways, a different task than being an expert in your field and solving problems where you excel.
Just as a squirrel quickly darts through the treetops but doesn’t have an overview of the forest, a giraffe cannot quickly scurry over branches to find nuts, even though its long neck provides an overview.
An Illustrative Example
Let’s give our squirrel the name Torben. Torben is a “genius” in his field. Intuitively and with his expertise, he can conjure up solutions in no time. He particularly shines when things are urgent, because his experience and outstanding abilities allow him to solve problems, especially in crisis situations.
Torben is now nominated for a leadership role because of his performance—something he has long desired. However, as soon as he assumes his new position, he feels overwhelmed: He can’t delegate and wonders why his employees don’t really respect him or “follow” him. Even the crash course in “Leadership Responsibility” didn’t help. The tasks are too pressing for him, tasks he believes only he can solve efficiently.
He finds it difficult to maintain an overview and, like an architect, to delegate and structure tasks that he used to complete himself quickly—usually faster than others for whom he is now responsible. And he misses that, which is why he doesn’t want to delegate at all. However, he’s not even aware of this.
The Promotion Problem
Torben is a typical case of promotion understood as advancement to a leadership position. What was overlooked is that his profile is not work organization, but rather that he is an expert in his field: solving problems, seeing solutions in micro-areas where no one else sees them. But a leader doesn’t need to be able to do that.
Companies that primarily understand advancement as leadership responsibility face a major challenge in distinguishing between: desire for promotion, recognition of achievements, and leadership responsibility. The consequence is that such companies run the risk of operating with the handbrake on, as their newly promoted experts often cannot stand to watch their employees do their work less efficiently than they would themselves.
On top of this comes the pressure that they now bear responsibility for the overall result, but they watch as work is completed more slowly and often worse than they would do it themselves. The temptation is great: to quickly intervene and do it themselves. The result: overwhelm, excessive workload, slower work processes, and in the worst case: burnout.
Advancement Must Be Rethought
People who bear leadership responsibility don’t need to be such experts in their field as Torben. Furthermore, they can be advised by geniuses like Torben. They need to have the overview, create the structures, provide the spaces for the work that Torben loves to be managed efficiently. But that’s not Torben’s strength.
To speak in coaching language: Before his promotion, he was associated with his activity in his field because he loved it and is effective in it because he’s good at it. He wants a reward for his special achievements and to “advance.” But actually, he wants more recognition, not the task area of leadership responsibility itself.
People with leadership responsibility must be able to think dissociated and also look at the tasks to be accomplished with distance (i.e., at the meta-level), assign suitable employees, and see where the tasks to be accomplished can be effectively organized.
None of these jobs is more or less valuable. They are just different. There are only a few Torbens who can also do this.
What Could Be the Solution?
How can companies better recognize these connections to promote the full potential of their workforce and be organized in such a way that they can manage their standardized tasks and unavoidable emergencies in an agile, appreciative, and effective manner?
A giraffe simply cannot be like a squirrel, a squirrel cannot be like a giraffe, an eagle cannot be like a chicken, and a chicken cannot be like an eagle.
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