Congratulations. You finally got the promotion you were working towards, and it’s well-deserved.
You’re still in the same team, but now find yourself with a shinier title, more responsibilities, and, hopefully, better pay.
And the same people who were your equals a month ago now report directly, or there’s a dotted line.
Those who used to be your peers are absolutely thrilled, of course. One of their own has made it, so drinks are on you.
However, be under no illusion that the day your promotion was announced, every single one of them would have done a quick calculation about how much it would cost them to back you, and what it might cost them not to.
While you’re busy in those first few weeks trying to make everything feel normal for everyone again, assuring them that your new job title hasn’t gone to your head and you’re still the same person, your former peers and work friends are figuring out what to do with you.
And friendships or not, at this point, everyone becomes just a tad more Machiavellian towards you.
In this article, I talk about how to get the support from your former peers, now that you’ve been handed the keys to your very own corner office.
What changes when your peers become your reports
The most sensible thing to do after an internal promotion is to start by having one-to-ones with your new reports and not change too much too soon.
But you mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the power balance between you and your former work friends and peers has significantly shifted.
You may now be line managing those who were previously at your level, or, at the very least, you’re now responsible for signing off on their work. For doing their reviews. For deciding on their pay rises or bonuses.
Even if you work in a matrix organisation and have no direct reports, you’re now also present in meetings your former peers are not present in, giving you access to information they don’t have access to.
All of that has changed overnight, but what hasn’t changed, as far as you’re concerned, is the relationship with your ex-peers. That’s something you built over months, maybe years, back when you were equals.
Some of these people you’d have a laugh with over beers in the pub. You’d go to them to moan about the leadership team or about Helen from Accounts. You’d call each other work wife or husband and enjoy the banter.
All these little habits were fine between equals, but they’ll start to go against you now that you’re the boss, or at the very least, you’re no longer equals.
That’s not to say that your work relationship won’t survive, but the terms and conditions of how you interact in that relationship are going to have to be renegotiated. As the higher-status person in that relationship, you will have to take the lead in that renegotiation.
Pulling back socially: why you can’t be one of the gang and the boss
One obvious thing that’s difficult for some to swallow is to pull back from the social side a bit. You can’t be at Friday drinks as one of the gang and then pull them up on Monday for missing their targets.
The rule of thumb should be that if you’re not feeling a little lonely and left out, you’ve probably not pulled back enough. That may sound harsh and depressing, but it’s the price of admission when climbing the corporate ladder.
When you pull back socially like that, it signals that things have changed and that you’re now the one in charge. Some of your former peers will take that signal and adjust. Others will test whether you really mean it, both publicly and privately.
For the ones testing your authority, being an easygoing, likeable boss won’t be enough.
Work out what each former peer wants from you
Other than cooling down the social side, the most important job in your new role is to figure out what each of your former peers now wants from you. Maybe it’s a promotion of their own, more money, recognition they’ve been denied in the past, or a manager who finally fights their corner. Or, maybe they just want you to leave them alone.
Having worked closely with some of these people, you might think you already know what each one wants. But you don’t, not any more. As peers, you and they traded on equal terms, helping each other out and swapping favours. If you wanted something, you usually had something to offer back, so people could afford to be fairly straight with you.
That balance has gone, because you now have things they want and can’t get anywhere else: their pay, their promotion, what gets said about them to the leadership. They have little of equal weight to trade back.
Once that balance tips, people start being careful around you. Some will talk up how ambitious they are, because they think that’s what you want to hear, while others will play down something they’d rather keep from you.
You’d do exactly the same with your own boss, so take what they tell you with a pinch of salt, and work out what’s really going on underneath.
The most politically effective people are the ones who can hide their own agenda while reading everyone else’s, so your first job should be to find out what everyone’s up to.
Not what they tell you in your one-to-ones, but what they’re really after.
An internal promotion offers a huge advantage here because you already know how these people operate and how to read them. You’ve seen with your own eyes the peers who cut corners when they’re under pressure, those who go silent when they’re unhappy, and the ones who are all charm until they don’t get their way.
Any outsider parachuted into your role would give an arm and a leg for that information because it would take them a year to learn it.
So watch them carefully. Notice who’s volunteering for projects and who’s avoiding it, who’s gone supportive overnight, who’s gone a bit quiet in meetings now that you got the job, and interpret those signals against what you already know about each of them.
The behaviour they show in front of you is the data, and what you’ve learned about them from working closely with them in the past, tells you how to read that data.
Why former peers stop being straight with you, and how to read them
Of course, the problem is that now you’re the boss, they’ll hold their cards closer to their chest than they did before your promotion.
Draw on what you know early, because your memory will fade faster than you think. Give them six months of being careful around you, and you’ll struggle to remember how they were before.
And once you know what someone wants, you have something to trade. After all, you now control things people want, and that’s not something to feel awkward about. It’s your toolkit from now on.
There’s a simple reciprocity at play: people back the person who helps them get what they’re after. Your job is therefore to find an overlap between what they want and what you need. You then give it to them, and you make sure they know it came from you.
You give the ambitious ones a stretch project, and make clear you gave it to them because you trust them. You tell those who are worried about their job that they’re safe. And you put those who crave recognition in rooms where the people they care about will see them, and you make sure they know you set it up.
That’s not you being manipulative. It’s you being deliberate with the power you’ve got, instead of pretending you don’t have it, so you don’t upset anyone.
Two people matter most here: the rival and the friend. Let’s take them in turn.
Managing the rival and the work friend after a promotion
Your rival might be a peer who went for your job and didn’t get it, but it could just as easily be someone who was never a big fan of yours, or someone you’ve got a history with.
What makes them a rival isn’t your past, but the fact that their interests now run against yours. No amount of warmth and likeability on your behalf is going to change that.
Many will make the mistake of trying to win them around by being extra nice and hoping they come good. However, that’s most likely to read as weakness, and they’ll take it as an opening.
Instead, you need to give them a reason to back you that has nothing to do with liking you: find the one thing they want that you can deliver. Maybe it’s a project they care about, or a path to their own promotion. You can be as obvious or covert about this as you feel is necessary, but you then make clear it’s better for them to work with you than against you.
Other than your rivals, you also need to keep an eye on your old work friends. Don’t fall into the trap of fooling yourself that the relationship hasn’t changed.
Relax too much around them, and before long, you’ll be telling them things you’d never tell the rest of your team. Who said what in an executive meeting, a potential re-org, etc. The moment you do, you hand one person an advantage over the others and over you.
You can keep the friendship going, but you must close the back channel. The same goes for the old banter. Keep the warmth, but never let them see you take a side against your colleagues or the organisation.
And finally, remember the golden rule: back your people in public, but always have the hard conversations in private.
Some of your old peers will test your authority in public. You cannot let that slide because doing so would tell everyone else that they can do the same. Not by giving them a public dressing-down, but by talking to them privately, that same day.
Conclusion: you’re being watched from three directions, not just below
Perhaps I’ve made it sound like the relationships you’ve built over time are being reset. That is indeed what is happening, and you mustn’t be naive about that.
Also, bear in mind that you are now being watched from two other directions.
Your new peers are also deciding whether you belong in their room, while the bosses who promoted you are watching how you handle yourself. The way you manage your old equals will provide them with the clearest signal about whether you are ready for the bigger job.
And yes, you can still go to the work drinks. Just be the one who stays sober while everyone else gets drunk and loose-lipped. As Machiavelli would have it, you’re there to gather data, right?