You're the boss | Transition from employee to manager - without making THESE five mistakes

So you’ve been promoted into a management position – what next? In this exclusive article for Grapevine Leaders, internationally certified leadership coach and consultant, Zana Goic Petricevic, looks at the pitfalls waiting to trip up new managers – and how to avoid them….

Stepping into a new manager position is often challenging as it requires a complete change of mindset to succeed. Leadership promotions normally come to someone who has been a fantastic executor, someone who is brilliant at getting work done. In a leadership role, what's expected of them has completely changed, but often their mindset is still thinking like a successful executor. This can often lead to mistakes being made – as many new managers have done before! Here are some of the key mistakes to look out for, and how to grow from them to become a bold leader.

1. Trying to be a hero

When stepping into a leadership position, many new leaders put pressure on themselves to be the hero the team needs. They put pressure on themselves, thinking that they need to bring all the solutions to every problem to save everyone and everything. But this thinking, while heroic, is unachievable and shows that the role of a leader has been misunderstood.

Leadership isn’t about being a single hero but raising the team around you to empower them to bring solutions themselves. It is about building trust within a team so that everyone, including the leader, can ask for help and doesn’t feel like they need to know everything. Part of building a culture of trust also means that you can build better accountability into a team so that everyone feels that they can bring together new solutions and be able to raise concerns when solutions aren’t working as well as they could. We need to destroy the image of a ‘know-it-all’ hero leader, to rebuild the image as a leader who can inspire trust within their team and isn’t afraid to ask for help.