Leaders, Manage Your Leadership Change!

In today's fast-paced business environment, leadership or manager changes are becoming more and more common. As someone who has been through it multiple times myself, I understand how challenging it can be. However, it's essential to manage this phase effectively to ensure a smooth transition.

The success of this change depends on how you handle it. While it can be an opportunity to learn something new from a different person, it can also result in fitment issues. Moreover, your career progression might be affected because your new leader will evaluate you based on their experiences, and your historical performance may not matter so much.

I remember once having a manager whose management style was different from mine. To maintain my leadership style, I had to make a constant effort not to learn from them and stick to my way of doing things.

Here are some tips to help you make this transition easier for yourself and your new manager:

Build Trust & Credibility: Building trust and credibility is crucial for establishing a strong relationship. Focus on developing it during your onboarding journey, and it will go a long way.

Be Honest: Be honest about the team and the organization. Recognize your personal bias and avoid them while onboarding your new leader.

Align on Success & Failure: A new leader may have different expectations in terms of success metrics. Align with them to understand what success means to your new leader.

Ensure Skip-level Relationships: Onboarding is an excellent time to ease people into skip-level relationships. Create clear communication channels between your team members and the new leader. Your team's life is going to change, so involve them in the process.

Check How Reporting Will Change: Understand how reporting will change with this change in leadership. Clear any doubts around new organizational structures and hierarchies. This will make things easier for you from a reporting perspective.

These are some of the things that you can do to manage your leadership change well. However, everyone has a different style, and one size doesn't fit all. Collaborate with the incoming leader and stay unbiased, and you'll do just fine!

What are some of the things that you have done to manage a leadership change? Share with me in the comments below.