What Does A Manager Have To Do After You Are Promoted?

Getting promoted is only the beginning
Getting promoted is only the beginning
Image Credit: Michael Ransburg

What is it that every manager is hoping for? Why it is to use your manager skills to be promoted, of course. When that special day comes, are you going to be ready? You’ll get a new job title, perhaps more money, maybe even a new office. However, it’s not going to be long before your mind is going to start to be filled with second thoughts. If you are not careful, you could end up sabotaging yourself. Upon getting promoted, there are several things that you are going to have to get busy doing.

Celebrate Your Promotion – Don’t Feel Guilty

The fact that you got promoted is clearly a sign that somebody at your company thinks that you are doing a good job. What this means for you is that you need to start to say the same thing to yourself – “I’m doing a good job.” One of the biggest challenges that managers face when they get promoted is that there might be a colleague that they’ve been working with that they feel is just as good as they are; however, they got the promotion and their colleague did not.

If you aren’t careful, you can start to have guilty feelings about this. Instead, what you need to realize is that they are good workers just like you are. Their time to be promoted will eventually come. You need to be supportive of your coworkers, but at the same time you need to have a healthy thrill at your promotion. View your promotion as a vote of confidence from your company that you richly earned.

It’s Ok To Be Nervous

Any new position has the potential to make a manager feel nervous. The company has said that they believe in us, but at the same time they are yanking us out of the position that we had grown used to and they are placing us into unfamiliar territory. If you were not just a bit nervous, then you would not be human.

The right thing for a manager to do is to stop for just a moment and spend some time thinking about just exactly what you are nervous about. One of the best ways to get ahead of your nerves is to sit down and make a list. Once you have your list, you now have a concrete set of things that you can work to improve your skills on and get some manager training to get better at. By doing this you’ll be dealing with the very things that are making you nervous.

Say Goodbye To Your Old Job

Guess what a promotion means? It means that you now have a new job. This means that you now have to say goodbye to your old job. All too often managers don’t seem to understand this and they keep doing their old job even as they start to do their new job. You need to treat leaving your old job just like you would treat a relationship that was breaking up – be sad for a bit and then get over it. Let the person taking your old job over have your desk and then walk off into the sunset and start your new job.

Don’t Get Promoted By Yourself

When you take over a new job, you will now be in contact with a new set of people. You don’t want to drop into the new position and grab all of the power for yourself. Instead, look for ways to see how you can help out the people that you will now be working with by involving them in some team building.

Some of your first thoughts have to be to see if you can come up with projects that the people that will be on your team can work on. You need to be thinking of ways that you can help out the person that you will now be reporting to. You also have to be thinking about ways that you can be a benefit to your new team. You are going to want to be looking for ways that you can spread your new found success around in order to make sure that everyone benefits from it.

What All Of This Means For You

Every manager is thrilled when they find out that they have been promoted. However, it turns out that with this gift comes a great deal of personal challenge. A promotion means that we are going to have to leave the job that we’ve come to know and understand and be willing to take on a new challenge. Managers now face the question of what is the best way to go about starting a new job when you have been promoted?

When we get selected for a promotion, our initial thoughts are generally happy ones. However, if we are not careful we can start to become full of self doubt. When you get promoted view it as your company telling you that you are doing a good job and be happy about it. A new job means that you are going to be called on to perform new tasks and this may make you feel nervous. Understand that you’ve been promoted because your company thinks that you can handle the new job. Promoted managers need to take the time to say goodbye to their old jobs so that they don’t get stuck working two jobs. When you start your new job you need to make sure that its not all about you. Take the time to work with the people that you’ll be working with and provide them with challenging new projects that they can work on.

Being a manager is only one step on our career. We hope that we do a good job and that our firm will see the good job that we’re doing and will eventually promote us. We need to understand that getting promoted is only the start. Once we’ve been promoted its what we do next that is going to set the stage for how this job turns out. Understand that you’ve been promoted because you are good at what you do and then jump into the new job the right way and this job will turn out to be your best job ever.

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

Question For You: When you get promoted, do you think that you should work closely with the person who will be taking over your old job?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As managers, where we work will probably play a big role in how we develop our manager skills. If we could all choose where we worked, I’m pretty sure that a lot of us would all agree that working for Google would probably be a good choice. Once upon a time Google was a small start-up company. Since then, they have grown and they now employ over 70,000 workers. It turns out that all those people needed leaders. And not just any leaders, but people who can do it in an environment of incessant change and planetary scale. Just exactly how has Google gone about providing this kind of manager training?