BUSINESS COACHING
New to Leadership: Growing into Your New Role
Moving into your first leadership role is often experienced as recognition. At the same time, many new managers receive little or no preparation for this shift. You were professionally capable, or you would not have been given the role. But leadership requires different skills from those that brought success until now, and that usually becomes apparent only once you are already in the middle of it.
Especially at the beginning, the question “What should a good leader be like?” is less useful than another: What has made me successful until now, and which of those strengths still serve me in the new role? What do I need to learn or use differently?
Moving from Expertise into Leadership
Many new managers were promoted because they are professionally strong, dependable and solution-focused. These very strengths often have to be used differently in the new role.
If you are used to solving problems yourself, you may quickly step in again when something does not work. In the short term, this is often more efficient. In the long term, responsibility repeatedly returns to you. The team also learns that difficult issues will ultimately be resolved by the manager.
A pattern can easily develop that nobody consciously planned.
The heart of the new role is therefore not to remain indispensable as an expert. It is to set priorities, make decisions, provide direction and help other people take responsibility and do good work.
The question “What should I stop taking on myself?” is at least as important as “What additional things must I do now?”
Closeness and Distance What Changes in Your Relationship with the Team?
Relationships change when you move into leadership. This becomes particularly noticeable when you manage former colleagues.
You may still have lunch with the same people and remain socially part of the group. At the same time, you suddenly know information you cannot share. You have to assess performance, represent decisions and set expectations that not everyone will like.
Some people try to demonstrate their new role by creating more distance. Others hold on to the previous familiarity for as long as possible. Either approach can strain the new relationship.
Authority does not arise from conspicuous distance or from trying to remain “one of the group” indefinitely. It develops primarily when your behaviour is dependable, your decisions are understandable and you deal transparently with the ways in which your role has changed.
Delegating Without Withdrawing
Delegation is one of the biggest adjustments involved in beginning a leadership role.
It becomes difficult when other people approach tasks differently from the way you would. The urge to control more closely or take the task back is understandable. At the same time, employees need different degrees of guidance. Someone new to a task needs something different from someone who has worked independently for years.
One question is especially useful:
Is the result genuinely inadequate, or is it simply the route to that result that differs from my own?
Delegation is not only about reducing your workload. It is an important part of development. Employees can take on more responsibility only if they are genuinely given the opportunity to do so.
Your role is to make the objective, responsibility and scope for action clear, provide direction where needed, and still allow others to find their own route to the outcome.
Difficult Conversations Are Part of the Role
Leadership becomes most tangible when something is not going well: the first piece of clear corrective feedback, addressing underperformance, a conflict that can no longer continue, or a decision you know will not be well received.
Such conversations are easily postponed. You may not want to damage the relationship, or may hope the problem will resolve itself. The message is also sometimes phrased so cautiously that the expectation remains unclear.
Clarity does not mean harshness.
Problems should be raised promptly, expectations explained clearly and consequences named before a situation has already become entrenched. Good leadership is not measured by being as popular as possible. It shows in people knowing where they stand, receiving support and still taking responsibility for their performance and behaviour.
When Responsibility Suddenly Becomes More Visible
Leadership changes not only the task but also the nature of responsibility.
Previously, difficult decisions may have been shared or referred upwards. Now the team often expects you to take a position. Mistakes are more visible. At the same time, becoming a manager does not automatically give you all the information.
At such moments, the question can quickly arise: Am I really equal to this role?
Uncertainty does not automatically indicate that something is missing. Some of it simply belongs to growing responsibility and unfamiliar experience. In other areas, there may genuinely be a skill you need to develop.
Not every problem is caused by the manager. Unclear goals, conflicting expectations, insufficient resources or a lack of backing make leadership objectively harder. Continually compensating for these conditions through personal effort does not resolve the underlying problem.
When Can Coaching Be Useful?
Especially at the beginning of a leadership role, a neutral and experienced sounding board can help you develop your leadership consciously. How do I want to lead? Which of my previous strengths still serve me? Where am I still behaving as I did in my old role? How does my behaviour affect the team?
There are also specific situations that can be prepared or reflected on effectively in coaching: managing former colleagues, a delegation where you are unsure how much direction is needed, a difficult conversation or the question of whether your assessment of a situation is sound.
A sounding board is useful because not every uncertainty can be discussed openly with the team or your own manager. Coaching creates a space in which you can examine decisions, observations and reactions without immediately triggering an internal assessment or positioning.
We look beyond you as an individual. The expectations of your team, your own manager, relationships, roles, organisational conditions and the interaction between your behaviour and other people's responses are also decisive.
The aim is not to teach you a prescribed leadership style. It is to develop your own way of leading and, with growing experience, make more conscious decisions about what works in each situation.
As a German-qualified psychologist and systemic coach, I combine psychological expertise with many years of leadership experience and experience in organisational development and change processes.
Are you new to leadership and keen to shape your role consciously?
Would you like to prepare for this career step and manage the transition from specialist to leader successfully?
Get in touch