The promotion came. The title changed. And nobody prepared you for what changed with it.
One day you were the expert — the person with the answers, the one people came to, the one who delivered.
And then overnight, you were the manager.
Suddenly the job wasn’t about what you knew how to do. It was about helping others do it. About having conversations you’d never been trained for. About managing people who, last week, were your peers — and some of whom perhaps expected the role themselves.
I’ve experienced and seen this transition play out across organisations of every size and sector. And I’ve seen how rarely it gets the support it deserves.
Because most organisations promote people for what they’ve achieved — and then largely leave them to figure out the rest.
The result? Some of the most capable, well-intentioned people quietly struggling in silence.
Not because they aren’t good enough. But because the skills that made them excellent individual contributors are genuinely different from the skills that make an excellent leader.
Being brilliant at the work doesn’t automatically transfer to being brilliant at developing the people who do the work.
Knowing your subject deeply doesn’t automatically give you the language for a difficult feedback conversation.
Being trusted by peers doesn’t automatically translate to being trusted as their manager.
These are learnable capabilities. But they have to be learnt — they don’t simply arrive with the job title.
Some of the finest professionals I’ve worked with hit their first real wall at exactly this point. Not because they lacked potential. But because nobody gave them a framework for the identity shift, the new conversations, or the entirely different set of accountabilities they’d just taken on.
If you’re in this transition right now — or supporting someone who is — the single most useful thing I can offer is this:
The discomfort you’re feeling is not a sign that you’re wrong for the role.
It’s a sign that you’re growing into it. And that’s exactly where good leaders are made.