I had just finished a session on managing performance, the kind I have run a hundred times, and she had been quiet through most of it. Now she was standing at the edge of the table with her notebook still open, asking me something that was not on the agenda.
“How do I go back and be their boss on Monday, when on Friday I was the one complaining about the workload with them?”
I have thought about that question for years, because it is the one that I had struggled with myself, when I made Manager for the first time, and it is the one that actually decided how I and my work showed up.
We had spent the morning on objective setting, on how to structure a one-to-one, on giving constructive feedback, two way conversation and active listening. All of it useful. None of it touching the thing that was making her jittery.
Three transitions, not one
Here is what I have come to believe, and it comes from first hand experience. Not everything I did was right, I floundered and learnt. But I wish someone had hand held me then, guided me.
When someone becomes a manager for the first time, three separate transitions begin at the same time.
The first is the task transition, the move from doing the work to enabling it. Delegation, prioritisation, running a review, setting objectives. It is teachable, it is observable, and it fits neatly into a two-day agenda, which is precisely why it dominates every curriculum I have ever been asked to look at.
The second is the identity transition. Someone who spent years becoming genuinely good at something walks into a job where she is a novice again. Her sense of professional worth was built on work she could point at, and overnight that work belongs to other people. What she feels is an identity crisis. It gets described, if it gets described at all, as a strange emptiness at the end of the week when she cannot say what she actually did that week.
The third is the one she was asking me about. The relational transition. Authority on paper arrives instantly. Authority in the room has to be earned again, in front of people who remember the earlier version of you or dont know you at all.
Most first time manager programs focus on the first and leave people to improvise the other two.
What improvising actually produces
This is what leaving them to figure it out looks like. The identity transition, left alone, produces a manager who delegates the work without trust, starts micromanaging, keeps redoing the work others deliver, because that is where she still feels excellent. It is not a delegation problem. She is holding on because letting go makes her fearful, invisible and stressed, and nobody has told her that the feeling is normal, expected, and temporary.
The relational transition, left alone, produces the manager who fears being misunderstood and over-invests in being liked. She defers the hard conversation in week three because the friendship is still warm, and defers it again in week eight, and by month six the issue has grown to a size where the correction, when it finally comes, lands as arbitrary and disproportionate. The kindness in month leads to the harshness in month six.
And here is the part I think should change how we design for this. A first-time manager who has genuinely settled her identity and rebuilt her relationships will work out delegation on her own, usually inside a quarter, because delegation is a practical problem and she is a practical person. The reverse never happens. Nobody has ever attended enough workshops to feel like they belong in a room where they have not yet earned trust.
What would change this
So what do we actually do?
- We name the competence dip before it arrives : Telling a new manager that she is about to struggle at her job for roughly a quarter, that this is a feature of the transition and not a verdict on her, changes what she does with the feeling. Unnamed, it becomes a dent in self-confidence leading to imposter syndrome, and the retreat into individual work begins. Named in advance, it becomes something she can work with.
- We give her language for the conversation she was asking me about, rather than leaving her to improvise it : The explicit discussion with a former peer or a new team member about what changes and what does not, held in the first fortnight, is worth more than any module on difficult conversations. Most new managers avoid it because it feels awkward. It is awkward. It is also the highest-return awkward conversation of the entire first year.
- And we put her own manager into the design, not as a stakeholder who receives a briefing email but as a participant with obligations of their own: what to ask about, what to stop escalating, what to protect while this person finds her feet. The identity and relational transitions get worked out in the space between a new manager and her boss. They do not get worked out in a classroom.
None of this is expensive. What it asks of us is a willingness to admit that the part of this we are most comfortable teaching is not the part that determines the outcome.
The part that stays with me
I answered her question that day, and I hope I answered it well. What has stayed with me is that she waited for the room to be empty before she felt she could ask.
Teach the task. Name the identity. Rebuild the relationships.
The order matters more than the content