Managing the people who were your peers last month

On Friday you were in the pub with them, complaining about the roadmap. On Monday you write their objectives. Nobody has told them the rules changed, and nobody has told you either, and the first six weeks of this are almost entirely made of small moments where you do not know which version of yourself to be.

You are not behind. Nobody gets prepared for this

The Chartered Management Institute surveyed more than 4,500 workers and managers with YouGov and found that 82% of people who move into management have had no formal training for it. They called them accidental managers. It is a survey run by a body that sells management qualifications, so weigh it accordingly, but the number matches what anyone who has been promoted internally already suspects.

You were promoted because you were good at the job you are now supposed to stop doing. That is not a failure of character. It is the standard design of the situation.

Three things changed on Monday

Your words got heavier

The thing you say half-seriously about the deadline is now a decision. “Maybe we should look at that” used to be a thought. It is now a task someone spent their Tuesday on.

This catches everybody, and the fix is mechanical: say which one you are doing. “Thinking out loud here, not asking for anything.” Or: “This one I do need.”

The information stopped flowing

You used to hear everything, because you were standing next to it. Now you are the person who writes the reviews, and every piece of news has a price attached to it before it reaches you. People are not hiding things from you personally. They are doing sums about risk, the way everybody does with their manager, including you with yours.

You inherited a history you did not make

The promise your predecessor made about the promotion. The grudge about the reorg two years ago. The reason those two people do not sit near each other. It is all yours now, and most of it will arrive as a surprise in the middle of a conversation about something else.

The authority you think the title gave you

Linda Hill followed new managers through their first year for Becoming the Boss, and the misconception she found most often was about power: new managers expect the position to come with authority, and discover that what it actually comes with is dependence, on people who have not yet decided to follow them.

Julie Zhuo, who ran design at Facebook from her twenties, puts the same thing in one line in The Making of a Manager: your job is no longer your output. It is theirs. Every instinct you built getting promoted now points in slightly the wrong direction.

Say the awkward thing once, out loud

Amy Gallo’s advice on managing your former peers is to acknowledge the change rather than hope everyone quietly absorbs it. The two failure modes are both attempts to avoid one uncomfortable minute.

• Pretending nothing has changed. Friendly, popular, and it collapses the first time you have to hold someone to a deadline.
• Overcorrecting into formality. The new distance reads as coldness, and people conclude the promotion changed you. Usually it changed your calendar.

The middle is a single conversation with each person in week one. What you are keeping, what is genuinely different, and one question: what do you need from me that you were not getting before?

Lara Hogan’s first one-to-one questions are the best list for it. How do you like to receive feedback? What does a bad day look like for you? What did my predecessor do that you want me to keep? Ask them now, while nothing is at stake, and you will have the answers in your pocket on the day something is.

The friend

You can stay friends with someone you manage. It is harder than people admit, and it requires one thing you have to say out loud rather than assume: there are now things you cannot tell them.

Try it in advance, on a good day: “There is going to be stuff I cannot talk about now, and when I say I cannot talk about it, that is all it means. It is not a hint.” If your friend can hear that without it becoming a thing, you are probably fine. If they cannot, you have found out early, which is better than finding out during a redundancy round.

Be aware of the other half too, which is everyone else. If you go to lunch with the same person every day and they used to be your work friend, the team is not thinking about your friendship. They are thinking about whose projects get resourced.

The one who wanted your job

Her work is technically fine and she has stopped offering anything else. The instinct is to avoid her or to over-reward her, and both are visible from space.

Name it once, early, in private, without asking her to reassure you. “You went for this role. You did not get it and I did. I am not going to pretend that is comfortable, and I would rather we talked about what you want next than work around it for a year.” Then ask, and then listen for considerably longer than is comfortable.

Be honest about what you can influence and what you cannot. The fastest way to lose someone in this position for good is a promise about next cycle that you are not in a position to keep.

The first hard one is the whole job

At some point in the first three months, one of them will do something you have to raise, and you will have a day or two where you tell yourself it is probably a one-off.

That delay is the actual risk. Six weeks of not mentioning it turns a small correction into a confrontation, and worse, your silence becomes part of the evidence: they carried on because nobody with your job title said anything. If you are managing people older or more experienced than you, which is common and survivable, the delay costs you even more, because it reads as exactly the hesitancy they were watching for.

Six months in, almost nobody remembers the awkward first fortnight. What they remember is whether you were straight with them, whether you said the difficult thing while it was still small, and whether the answer you gave in private matched the one you gave in the room.