What Managers Should Do (Or Not Do) When You Get Promoted

Getting promoted is great – but what do you do now?
Getting promoted is great – but what do you do now?
Image Credit: Martin Terber

Congratulations to you! You’ve just been promoted! Finally all of that great work (and the great work of your team) along with your manager skills have been recognized. Umm, now what should you be doing? The world that you used to know has gone away. You are now in a new position and the people who promoted you and for that matter the rest of the company have new expectations of you. Just exactly what is a manager expected to do after they have been promoted?


What NOT To Do When You Get Promoted

Look, you’ve been promoted. What this means is that your world has changed. The person that you were is no longer the person that you are. What this means for you is that you can no longer pretend that you are still the person that you used to be. Trying to do so would be a mistake. Your promotion is going to affect every single social relationship that you have in your office. You are going to have to realize this and you are going to have to take the time to build new relationships with everyone that you come into contact with. It turns out that there really is no manager training for how best to deal with a change like this.

You got your promotion because the people who run your company took a look at the work that you and your team were doing and they were pleased. You have been able to accept assignments, understand what was being asked of you, delegate the work, and then make sure that everything got done on time. These are all great skills to have. However, now that you have been promoted, everything is going to be different. The assignments that you and your team will be given will be different. The skills that will be required for you to successfully accomplish what will be asked of you will be different. You need to understand that the skills that got you this far will not be the skills that you need to succeed in your new job.

When we are placed in a new position, there is always a bit of nervousness on our part. We’re thrilled to have been honored with the gift of the promotion; however, we’re not really sure that we have the skills that are going to be required to do a good job in this new position. One of the mistakes that a lot of newly promoted managers do is to try to look like they know everything. Look, it’s a new position and there is no way that you can know everything that you need to know. Don’t attempt to come across as being the person who has all of the answers. You’ll just be seen as trying to be strong when you are not. Admit what you don’t know and spend your time learning what you need to pick up.


What To Do When You Get Promoted

Getting a promotion is a great thing. It is a form of a complement from your company to you. However, it is going to change every aspect of your work life. You need to understand this and then you need to take action. One of the biggest changes will be how you interact with people at the office once you assume your new position. After your promotion you are going to have to have talks with your friends in order to set new boundaries that will allow you to avoid being seen as showing favoritism to specific people. You also have to have talks with your friends in order to find out how your promotion is going to affect your relationship from their point of view. View this as a form of team building. Everything can be worked through, you just need to take the time to have the required talks.

You will not be able to be successful in your new position by yourself. What this means is that you are going to need some outside help. Once you’ve been promoted, you have a new task that you are going to have to accomplish. You need to find a confidant who works outside of your department who is willing to work with you. This is the person that you are going to lean on for such things as emotional support when the pressures of the new job become too much for you. You’ll need their guidance in order to be successful in your new position.

Perhaps one of the goals that you had had in your last position was to get promoted. If so, then congratulations – you’ve been successful! Now that you find yourself in your new position, you are going to have to take the time to create new goals for yourself. These goals are going to be critically important for you because they will define what you and your team will be working to achieve. One of your goals in your new position has to be to allow yourself to become satisfied with your work. What this means is that you will need to take the time to find out what your sources of satisfaction will be and then make sure that you can maximize them.


What All Of This Means For You

Getting a promotion is a major accomplishment for any manager. Congratulations! However, what many managers don’t realize is that when we are promoted, our lives are going to completely change. What used to work for us, will no longer work. How we used to interact with people will no longer be the same. When we get a promotion, one of our first jobs needs be to take the time to understand just exactly what we are going to not do and what we are going to have to start to do.

Once you’ve been promoted, you need to understand that your promotion is going to affect every single social relationship that you have in your office. This means that you are going to have to take the time to work out where you now stand with everyone that you’ll be working with. You need to understand that the special set of skills that allowed you to get your promotion will not be the same set of skills that you need to use in your new job. In your new job you won’t have all of the answers and so you have to be careful to not to try to look like you do. You will need to meet with your friends and establish new boundaries and determine how your promotion is going to affect your friendship. You can’t do this all by yourself and so you’ll need to find a confidant to work with you. A new job will require both new goals and new sources of work-related satisfaction.

Any time that we get promoted we tend to feel very good about what we’ve been able to accomplish. This is a good thing – you have been recognized for your successes. However, this is not the last promotion that you want to receive. Starting the new job will be like starting to work on your next promotion. This means that you need to work out all of the relationship issues and job tasks that are going to be required in order to help you to achieve your next set of work goals. Take the time to do all of the new things that you have to do and you’ll discover that your new position was the perfect position for you.


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™


Question For You: When you get promoted, how much time do you think that you have to get all of your new relationships worked out?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the least desirable parts of being a manager is the number of meetings that we find ourselves attending. In fact, there seem to be some days that are just back-to-back meetings that never seem to end. While we are in these meetings it’s pretty common for a manager to wish that they were just about any other place. It turns out that meetings are important ways for information to get shared within a company. However, it sure seems that a lot of the meetings that we find ourselves attending despite our manager skills are a complete waste of our time. Isn’t there a better way to do these things?