Is everyone as happy about your promotion as you are? What should definitely change in your thinking in your new role? How do you move out of your specialist suit and into your leader’s shoes?
The news of a promotion can come as a bolt from the blue or be the result of a hard-earned achievement. Regardless of the path taken, the emotions that accompany it are very intense. Euphoria, excitement, adrenaline rush (pleasant yet unconscious incompetence) alternate with fear, uncertainty and complete confusion (unpleasant yet conscious incompetence). The question naturally arises: will I be able to handle it?
The first surprise you may experience is the feeling that not everyone seems to be happy about your promotion. This fear can be read on the faces of the team you are taking over, even if you are becoming the leader of your former colleagues. Not only do you enter a state of uncertainty yourself, but others don’t seem to help you in this.
I have already had this experience and I am happy to share my life lessons with you.
The first lesson is about changing your perspective. My former colleague told me straight that she should be in my position now and that she deserved the promotion that I received. Although these words were not pleasant, today I am grateful to her for revealing her cards and pouring out her frustration at the beginning of our new relationship. This helped me understand her resulting behavior. Remember, in such situations, appreciate the other person’s openness, accept the information and be sure to thank them for their honesty. Give the person who felt unappreciated by your promotion time to grieve. In this case, it may not be about you, but about them. After all, whoever takes your place is still not them. Once the denial stage is replaced by a phase of acceptance, you will start to build the conditions for your cooperation in small steps. Lesson one teaches me: my joy can also be someone else’s sorrow, and it’s not all about me at all.
The second lesson is about a point of reference. One day, I was able to observe two equally qualified and highly respected female leaders being promoted. The thought that both women were now moving on to other positions and that, although this was a change for them, it could be good news for the organization was an overreaching deduction, probably because the promotion did not directly concern me. On the day the well-liked female managers were promoted, I was surprised by the cold reception of this information by the organization’s employees. So I asked one of the managers a question: why didn’t anyone from the crew congratulate the new leaders on their promotion and why was there such a gloomy atmosphere at the meeting? In response, I heard: “The fact that someone has proven themselves in their position is no guarantee that they will also be able to handle the new one.” From the employee’s perspective, the status quo is disrupted, they don’t know what will happen, and they know what has been. They don’t know how they will work together, but they know how they worked with their previous boss. So how can you enjoy the unknown? Lesson two teaches me: we gain formal authority with a promotion, but informal authority, which makes people follow their boss because they want to, requires specific words, corresponding behavior, and finally consistency in action, which means I have to earn it. Trust is not something I am given once and for all; I will have to build it up again in new circumstances.
My third experience concerns the reflection on the promotion of specialists. I call it the specialist’s curse. When a promotion falls on you like a bolt from the blue because you are a good specialist, you should review your mindset. If you think you can clone your skills and your team will soon be a carbon copy of your expertise, you are wrong. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you will stop struggling with burdensome micromanagement. The day I heard from a member of my team: “Asia, we will never do it the way you would do it” was a breakthrough in my work. It was a gift. These words made me realize that I was trying to shape my team in my own way. I stubbornly strove to receive tasks in the form in which I would deliver them myself. I was even firmly convinced that this was expected of me from the day of promotion. Not only was I exhausted from bossing my team around, but I was also taking away all the pleasure of work, which comes first from a sense of influence and then from progress. Realizing my role, which is not about doing what I have been doing so far after promotion and making sure that others do it the same way, but about helping others to be equally good specialists, only at their own pace, in their own way and with their own failures and successes. Lesson three taught me that from the first days of working as a leader, I should forget about my previous expertise and start building a new mindset. I am to become an expert in building and leading a team, and these are completely new tasks for me to accomplish.
These three stories have changed a lot in my perception of myself as a team leader. They helped me understand that the world rarely revolves around me, I started to distance my perspective and see myself as a link in a larger whole, better understanding my new role. I started to replace judgment with curiosity, ask more questions than I answered, listen more carefully and use the leader’s narrative, the so-called broken record narrative. If you want to learn from my experience and build your new expertise more consciously, I would be happy to meet you at my workshops. See you soon!
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Joanna Kominiak
business coach, facilitator, design thinking moderator Leitmotif: Work smarter, free yourself from the absurd. See the sense, do something for a reason, for a purpose. Pause, gain perspective and be inspired. Inspire passion.
