Establish New Boundaries With Employees

your first 90 days Apr 03, 2019

Many companies pride themselves on offering opportunities for growth inside the company, preferring to promote from within if at all possible. It’s a good policy that encourages loyalty and reward for a job well done, but for the novice manager – recently awarded a senior role in the company he or she may have worked in for years – it comes with a few additional difficulties.

You may now be in charge of people you previously worked alongside as a coworker. Your new peers may well be other senior managers who used to manage you. If you are not given any advice or training to handle this transition, it can be a tough one to pull off.

If you start your new job with ‘all guns blazing’, for instance, you risk alienating your new team who struggle to accept this new stricter, more aggressive you. Especially considering you were drinking alongside them in the bar complaining about the boss as well only one week or month ago.

It won’t work if you try to stay the same coworker you were before the promotion either. This is a common mistake many new managers make; worried that their former work friends and coworkers might resent their new position in the company hierarchy, they try to stay ‘one of the team’.

They may attempt to demonstrate that they haven’t changed, for instance, by continuing to share personal information and seeking to maintain the friendships they had beforehand. Perhaps they even commiserate with their employees about the CEO, just as they did before.

They fail to establish new boundaries or recognize that their role has changed, and they fail to understand that their new job requires different skills in order to build new relationships.

Jackson, a new middle manager of one month, ran into exactly this problem. Thrilled about his promotion but worried how others would react, especially two coworkers who also went for the same job, he struggled to set new, relevant boundaries.

Overseeing a small team in a bank, he often carried on as he did before, even sometimes doing the same work rather than delegating to his team as he should have done. Of course, continuing to shoulder his old workload didn’t leave him much time for his new tasks, and his direct supervisor didn’t fail to let him know that she wasn’t happy with his work.

At times like these, in a desperate bid to show dominance and prove he was up to the job, Jackson pulled rank on his employees and barked orders. From one day to the next, one minute to the next, the team didn’t know if he would be a peer or an angry manager, and all trust between them was lost.

The Solution

Things only improved for Jackson when he admitted his problems to a fellow senior manager, now his real peer. This person, more experienced than Jackson, could see exactly where he was going wrong and helped to get him back on track.

Jackson learned that he shouldn’t expect relationships to remain the same; they cannot. Instead he had to discover new skills and reform those relationships on a different level.

As the manager, for instance, he could still be supportive and approachable to his employees, but he also had to remain objective. Likewise, while he provided support for them when relevant, he shouldn’t expect them to return it. Instead he had to form alliances with his new peers, those people previously above him in the company. These peers would offer him support when needed.

He also came to realize that, no matter what his personal opinions of the CEO or the company as a whole, he should never share them with his direct reports. Ditto, his personal life was now irrelevant to his employees.

Some practical steps:

  • If you’re in this position, you can subtly shift your behavior without it being very obvious. For instance, there’s nothing wrong with still joining in on after-hours activities with the team and offering support. The key, however, is to appreciate that while you are there to meet the team’s needs, they are not there to meet yours. Focus on gaining allegiance through genuine leadership rather than relying on the goodwill of former friendships.
  • The phrase ‘it’s lonely at the top’ potentially describes this situation. It doesn’t have to be lonely, however, if you seek friendship and support from your new peers rather than your old ones.

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