How to Adapt Quickly to Your New Role!
A former client of mine had just been promoted. She came to me wanting advice on how to capitalise on her experience and make a real success of the new role.
Understanding What Success Now Requires
I started with a simple exercise. First, I asked her to list all the strengths, skills, and behaviours that had made her career successful up to this point. Then I asked her to list the strengths, skills, and behaviours the new role would demand of her.
The two lists overlapped, but they weren’t the same. The differences were mostly in the more subtle leadership behaviours that the new role required — the ones that come with working in complex situations, dealing with change, managing under performers or influencing tricky stakeholders.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Take teamwork. My client had built her career as a strong, hands-on member of a team. Now she was leading that same team, and the instinct to be “one of them,” rolling up her sleeves and doing the work herself, was no longer the advantage it once had been. What she needed now was to get them to accept her as the boss, not a peer, coach and develop them rather than work alongside them and that required sensitivity, influence skills and the ability to connect on a different level.
The coach Marshall Goldsmith has a well-known phrase for this: “what got you here won’t get you there.” Your past experience got you through the interview and into the role, but it isn’t, on its own, enough to make you successful in it. The behaviours that built your track record are not automatically the ones that will build your future.
What Will Take You to the Next Level?
So if you’ve recently stepped into a new role, it’s worth asking yourself the same two questions I asked my client.
- What behaviours have carried you this far, and which of them do you now need to let go of?
- And just as importantly, what new skills do you need to acquire to succeed in what comes next?
If you’ve just been promoted and are looking for help with these questions, get in touch to find out how we can help, contact Natalie Bagnall.
