Tip
Carole Robin talks about mental models: “One of the biggest gifts people get is learning that they hold some mental models, beliefs and assumptions—‘if I do this, that will happen.’ Those are beliefs we develop very early in our careers. It served me really well initially. If I’d burst out crying two months into the job, I’d have never ended up running a $50 million region. And then it over-served me, and then it cost me because I never had a reason to update it. I never realized I was paying a cost for continuing to hold that belief.”
Turns out AI leadership decisions work the same way.
You learned early in your career: “Stay technical or you’ll lose credibility.” So you dove deep into code, learned every framework, stayed hands-on for 15 years. It served you well—you became a respected tech lead, then engineering manager, then director. But now you’re a VP, and you’re still trying to review every PR, still debugging production issues at 2am, still insisting on architectural decisions that should be delegated.
That belief that served you at 28 is costing you at 52. You’re bottlenecking the team. Your skip-levels aren’t developing judgment because you won’t let them make calls. You’re exhausted from trying to stay technical at scale.
Younger leaders don’t recognize when beliefs become limiting because they haven’t lived long enough to see the arc. They’re still in the “this is serving me well” phase. You’ve been through enough career stages to recognize the pattern: what got you here won’t get you there. The belief that made you successful as an IC or manager actively undermines you as an executive.
That recognition—knowing which mental models need updating—comes from watching yourself and others hit the ceiling repeatedly. You’ve seen technical leaders fail to scale because they couldn’t let go. You’ve seen founders struggle because “work harder than everyone” stopped working at 500 people. You know beliefs have expiration dates.
Context
Carole Robin taught Interpersonal Dynamics (“Touchy Feely”) at Stanford Business School for 20+ years and founded Leaders in Tech. Her insight about mental models comes from watching thousands of leaders discover beliefs they formed early (like “never show vulnerability”) that initially served them but eventually limited them.
For experienced leaders navigating AI adoption and career transitions, this self-awareness is critical—you’ve lived long enough to recognize when beliefs that made you successful are now holding you back. Younger leaders can’t see this pattern yet because they’re still in the upward arc where those beliefs are serving them.