You Got Promoted, Now What?
On existing in the space between accepting the offer and actually knowing what you're doing.
In late 2020, I got the “Congratulations, you’re getting a promotion…into management!” phone call. A few days later I found out I’d be waiting for that promotion to become effective for six more months.
During a global pandemic, many paths for career development were effectively frozen and while a six month delay wasn’t ideal, slow progress was still progress. The leadership development program that would make my promotion official needed time to fully negotiate, approve, and place our cohort of new managers into assignments. The logic made sense and I tried to find comfort in knowing there was a plan while navigating the emotional roller coaster of a ‘hurry up and wait’ reality.
I’d love to tell you that I spent those six months carefully preparing, reading leadership books, and writing a vision for the manager I wanted to become.
What I really did was spiral through the same questions on a loop. How would I stay authentically ‘me’ when I went from individual contributor to manager? Who would be on my new team? What if their technical expertise was in areas I knew nothing about? What would I tell my current teammates? (The people I was leading as an individual contributor, who had no idea I was leaving.) Would my senior manager be open to teaching a new manager? There were so many layers of work-related uncertainty stacked on top of the outside-of-work uncertainty that was overwhelming so many people during the pandemic and with every painful rotation of the spiral I felt less and less anchored. It was pretty rough.
I started my first management assignment six months later in mid-2021 and transitioned from working fully remotely to fully on-site in an engineering lab environment with some of the smartest, strongest human beings I’d met. My team included experienced engineers and techs whose expertise in some areas outpaced mine by decades. My senior manager received me as a brand new manager and made the best of it with dry humor that broke the ice and made me feel glad to be there. However, it didn’t change the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as a manager in the beginning.
Even as a person with a reasonable level of self-awareness and curiosity, the leadership development resources available to me at the time really only prepared me for the basics of being a manager: how to run a bare bones one-on-one meeting, how performance management processes work, how to sign a time card, and when to call the fire department. What they couldn’t prepare me for were those same, persistent questions that continued to loom in a corner of my brain every day in those first months, plus a new one:
“If I’m not a technical expert in the room, how can I be of help to this team?”
It took me a while to find my footing and I sometimes feel I’m still finding it, but I gradually found my way out of the question spiral and back to my sense of self. What I’ve learned since (from my own transitions and from watching others step into management roles) is that the feeling of disorientation is universal. The spiral is normal. Navigating the gap between “I’m a manager now” and “I actually know what I’m doing” is not a failure of preparation, it’s just what the transition looks like from the inside.
So if you’re in a role transition right now: waiting to start, newly started, or six months in and still wondering if anyone is going to figure out that you are in fact winging it, below is a framework I wish I had for that first transition. Not a roadmap, just five questions worth sitting with when you’re in the spiral and need some help to climb out. The good news is, these questions are also valid for any later role transitions, so when that promotion to the next level of management comes…you’ll be ready!
Five Questions for Leaders During Role Transitions
1️⃣ What expertise did you earn that didn’t disappear when your title changed?
Technical depth doesn’t evaporate when you become a manager, it becomes context: for making calls, for knowing when to push back, for earning credibility with your team. You didn’t leave it behind. It’s still yours.
2️⃣ What are you most afraid to admit you don’t know yet? Say it out loud, even just to yourself.
Something shifts when you name this directly, even privately. It’s harder to spiral around something you’ve already looked at and acknowledged.
3️⃣ Who on your team needs you to see them as a person before you ask them about the project?
This is the shift that changes everything early on. The technical answers aren’t what your team needs from you right now, they need to know you’re paying attention to their needs as human beings.
4️⃣ What can you actually control today? Name one thing specifically.
Not “the situation.” Not “the culture.” One thing. Identify it, then work on a path forward.
5️⃣ What is still recognizably ‘you’ in this role?
A role transition changes all kinds of things but rarely changes everything. Finding what’s continuous: your instincts, your humor, the way you explain a super complex problem, is how you stay anchored while everything else shifts.
These questions don’t have to have clean answers, that’s valid and normal. They’re check-ins, not solutions. Something to return to when you’re feeling overwhelmed, unsure, or like you’ve lost your sense of self.
More good news: you got this and you’re not lost. You’re just in the middle of it and you’re not alone.
If you want more tools for the conversations and moments that are hardest to navigate as a new manager, The Manager’s Conversation Toolkit was built exactly for that. Paid subscribers get access immediately and maintain access through the pinned post at the top of the subscriber section.
I would love to hear about your first management / leadership assignments, your strategies for getting out of a spiral, the ways you stay grounded in moments of uncertainty, and the things you wish someone told you before you became a manager! Please feel free to add a comment, Substack Note, or send me a message at contact.kaleigh@proton.me. I read every reply and answer as many as I can.
See you next Tuesday,