Coaching & Workshops
Promoting from within is usually right and almost always handled badly. This session prepares a new manager for the specific problem of leading the people who used to be their friends, and gives their team a way to reset too.
Why it matters
An outside hire gets a clean start. Someone promoted from inside inherits every friendship, every private complaint about the last boss, and every assumption about who they will protect. The information stops within about two weeks and they usually do not notice until something has already gone wrong.
Most people respond by overcorrecting in one direction. They either go cold to prove they are impartial, which reads as a betrayal, or they stay one of the gang and cannot hold anyone to anything. Both are fixable, and both are much easier to fix before six months of habit sets in.
What the session covers
In the room
What they say, in what order, to whom. The reset lands much better as a deliberate conversation than as something people work out from behavior.
Nobody wants to be told to drop their friends. We work out what genuinely has to change and what is fine to keep.
Usually a performance issue or a schedule request. How the new manager handles it sets the tone for the next year.
Signs you need this
You will usually hear about this from the manager's manager rather than from the manager, who assumes the awkwardness is their own failing rather than a predictable feature of the situation.
If two or three of these are true you are past the point where it resolves on its own. None of them are unusual, and all of them are cheaper to fix than to wait out.
Sound familiar
Afterward
A reset conversation replaces six months of everyone guessing at the new rules.
Named and dealt with directly, instead of becoming a quiet source of friction all year.
Which is what actually establishes the manager, far more than any announcement did.
How it runs
The newly promoted manager, ideally with their own manager present for part of it. Works as a group when several people were promoted at the same time.
Sessions run on site or virtually, and they are built around situations attendees bring rather than case studies from a textbook. You get a fixed fee before we start, and the person who scopes it is the person who delivers it.
Practicalities
Questions
Anyone recently promoted to lead a team they were part of, and ideally their own manager, so the support continues after the session.
As early as possible. The first month is when the patterns set. It still works later, but you are then undoing habits rather than preventing them.
Either. Groups work well when several people were promoted at once and can compare notes. One-to-one is better if the situation is delicate.
Then we spend more time on the reset conversation and less on prevention, and we may recommend a session with the team as well.
Half a day for a group. A single new manager can be done in a focused two-hour session with follow-up.
Still worth doing, and we spend the time differently. Instead of preventing patterns we name the ones that formed and reset deliberately, which is harder but very doable.
Sometimes. If the team has already split into camps we may recommend a short session with them too, but we would tell you that after talking to the manager, not before.
Closer to coaching. There is a small amount of teaching and a lot of working through this specific team and these specific relationships.
Related
The broader foundation for anyone leading a team for the first time.
New Managers Workshop →Ongoing one-to-one support once the first months are behind them.
Leadership Coaching →Senior-led, delivered by the person you meet
Tell us who was promoted and when, and we will scope a session. No obligation, and we will say if one of the others fits better.
Tell us what is going on