What does it take to succeed as a senior leader? That’s a simple question with lots of potential answers. As an executive coach to leaders in the public, private and nonprofit sectors, and as a former public and private-sector executive myself, I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders “up close and personal.” I’ve also conducted research with dozens of senior leaders and scores of rising leaders to determine the factors that are most important to leadership success.

My conclusion is that successful senior leaders understand that what got them to the top ranks won’t keep them there. While they don’t change who they are, they do change what they do. They learn to pick up some critical behaviors that all successful senior leaders share and let go of others that, even though they worked on the way up, can lead to disaster for leaders with broader organizational responsibilities.

Take, for example, the need to pick up team reliance and let go of self-reliance. Top-performing senior leaders recognize that the way they add value is to bring their perspective and direction to the work, not in doing the work. To be direct about it, one of the biggest barriers to successfully making this shift is likely to be your own ego. Almost all of us enjoy praise and recognition. If you’ve made it to the executive level, or are close to moving there, you have almost certainly received a lot of positive feedback for your ability to get things done and make things happen. Have you noticed that your ego likes that and wants more of it? It’s that voice inside you saying, “No one else can do this as well as you can,” or “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Ironically, your ego might just be right; maybe there is no one who can do it better than you. That does not matter. To succeed as an executive you have to turn the work over to your team.

Steve Linehan, a senior vice president and treasurer of Capital One, first learned this lesson when he was promoted to an executive role at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation earlier in his career. “The pickup/let go thing really hit me hard at FDIC,” Linehan remembers. “I was very much a control freak….There were certain ways that I learned to do things in terms of the quality and thoroughness of work, how to write and I was put in a role where I just couldn’t do that. I was really forced to let go. It’s almost like an alcoholic admitting he is an alcoholic. You get to a point to where you can’t do it. You simply can’t.

“So I began to delegate work and I think the biggest thing for me was accepting work that was really good. It might not have been the way I would have done it, but it was really, really good. Accepting that was incredibly liberating. From that point on I think I began to accelerate.”

Closely connected to team reliance is picking up the habit of defining what to do and letting go of the urge to tell how to do it. When you are an expert or accomplished in a particular field, it can be very difficult to let go of offering your opinions or direction on how to do it. To play at the right level as an executive, you have to learn how to let go.

This is a lesson that George Sterner learned as an officer in the Navy. While he retired as a vice admiral and commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, a 90,000-person organization with 52 locations worldwide, Sterner began his career as a naval officer under the command of Adm. Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy. Rickover, who served on active duty until he was 80, was a brilliant perfectionist and notorious task master. To serve successfully under him, you had to know your stuff and George Sterner did.

“In certain aspects of engineering, I’m an expert,” he said. “I most likely know the right answer. I learned, though, that knowing the right answer is not always the most important thing.” After he had commanded a nuclear submarine, Sterner led a team that inspected subs. He recalled that, “I went from commanding one submarine to now looking at forty different ones a year for up to 30 hours each…. I realized that, and this was the biggest eye opener for me, there are hundreds of different ways of running those submarines. And a lot of them turned out pretty well. It was just not the way I did it. That was a big lesson.”

Where are you in your development as a leader? What do you need to either pick up or let go? To gain some perspective, ask yourself this question: “What is it, given the experience and access I have in my leadership role, that only I can do?” Your list of answers should be brief, but high in impact. Everything else that you could do should be turned over to your team.

Scott Eblin, a graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is president of the Eblin Group of Herndon, Va., which provides executive coaching, leadership assessment and other services to clients in the public, nonprofit and private sectors. He is the author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success (Davies-Black, May 2006, $26.95).