Last month, you were grabbing coffee and sharing workplace frustrations with your teammates. This month, you’re reviewing their performance goals and telling them that they’re falling short. The peer-to-manager transition is one of the most challenging shifts in your career.
But with the right approach, you can preserve relationships while building authority and being an effective manager.
The challenges of making the transition from peer to manager
It’s quite common for us to think that the problems here lie in other people – how they think about us now that we’re a manager and not their peer. But the truth is that most of the challenges relate to our own mindset and fears.
We tend to worry about things such as:
- Losing friendships.
- Having to give feedback to people we consider to be friends.
- Being perceived as betraying previously held trust.
Whilst these may well be in the minds of our former peers, most of the time these are fears that only really exist in our own minds. This means that we’re in control of our responses and approach to overcoming these fears.
There is also a fear that our peers think we’re making a move from “one of us” to “one of them” now that you’re in a management position. Again, this can be something that crosses the minds of our former peers but can also be a huge worry for ourselves.
Let’s look at some practical steps that you can take to overcome these fears and concerns to move effectively from a peer to a manager.
Set (and reset) expectations with your team
Your first step is to get clear on what you expect from your team when it comes to:
- Their individual roles and responsibilities.
- Goals and objectives as individuals and a team.
- How you’d like your team to behave with each other and stakeholders.
You should get clear on this in your own mind prior to communicating with your team. This helps you demonstrate clarity and leadership from the start of your new relationship with them.
When it comes to making the transition from peer to manager, you need to pay particular attention to setting expectations on:
- Objectively stating what high performance means for each person who used to be your peer.
- Being clear that you’ll be treating everyone the same when it comes to performing in your role and the support that you provide.
- Setting the expectation that you’ll be doing all that you can to support their career progression which means that they should expect positive and constructive feedback from you.
Take some time to think about all of this and plan the conversations that you’ll be having with your team.
Plan how you’ll address the change in dynamic
You should also take some time to plan how you’re going to address the rather large elephant in the room – that you used to be their peer and now you’re going to be their manager. Plan to talk about how this is a change in dynamic and your awareness of the challenges with the change.
This helps address the potential awkwardness and allows you some time to talk openly about it with your new team.
For example, you can say that you value your friendship and the work that you did as peers, which means that you want to be clear about how your relationship will evolve and change.
Set clear boundaries
Alongside setting expectations around someone’s role and responsibilities, you need to also set expectations and boundaries for how things will change in your relationship.
This will include things such as:
- Discussion of personal issues vs. professional issues.
- Sharing of sensitive information about colleagues i.e. you won’t be.
- How you’ll handle spending time together outside of work and how you’ll avoid talking about sensitive topics outside of the workplace.
- Communication between you e.g. you’ll need to avoid using things like WhatsApp for work conversations and need to use work email or Slack instead.
This will help cover off the softer side of this transition and avoid as much awkwardness as possible as time goes on.
(Re)build relationships
It’s important to take a fresh approach to building relationships with your new team. Of course, you’ll have existing relationships from your time working with them as peers, but it’s worth proactively taking time to build a relationship with them as their manager.
I’d strongly recommend putting in place the following:
- A regular schedule of one-on-one meetings with clear agendas and outcomes.
- Creating a personal development plan for your new team as quickly as possible after you start managing them.
- Letting your team know how they can expect to receive feedback from you.
- Team meetings to discuss what high performance looks like and what your team objectives and goals are.
- Setting time aside for social time together such as a team lunch or offsite together.
This can help get your new relationship dynamic off to a strong start whilst also subtly (but clearly) showing that you’re their manager now – not their peer.
Be consistent and fair with everyone
Once you’ve kicked off working with your new team, you should get into a consistent routine when it comes to one-on-one meetings, team meetings, personal development planning etc. During a period of change, such as getting a new manager, people can be nervous where there is uncertainty. An effective way to overcome this is to create consistency and stick to a plan.
The subtle, yet effective thing that you’re doing here as you move from a peer to a manager, is to put structure into communication, conversations and ways of working.
Most peer to peer relationships don’t really have these more formal ways of working, which means that you can start to show how your relationship has changed now.
Some final thoughts
Making the move from a peer to a manager is a tough transition but it’s one that many of us will have to make if we want to pursue a long and successful career as a manager.
But with the right amount of time, planning and thought, you can make a challenging situation far easier to deal with for both yourself and your new team – whilst maintaining friendships that you’ve built previously.
