Are You Suffering from Promotion Grief?

After years of sharpening your skills, attending to company priorities, and achieving stellar results, you’ve received the promotion to manager that had long been in your sights. Now you can lead that tight band of your former peers, and together you all can be rock stars.

That’s the plan, anyway, but it rarely works out quite that perfectly; sometimes, it doesn’t work out at all. And when that happens, often what we don’t see is that our identities subtly sabotage us.

Being successful in a new role is about more than being proficient in the previous role and more than just learning the skills of a new role. A work promotion also comes with the need to adjust our identity. Yet too often, employees and companies underestimate the psychological process inherent in moving up the corporate ladder.

When Work Roles and Identity Are Aligned

If you are confident and successful in your work role, then it’s likely to become an important part of how you see yourself. You may introduce yourself with your job title, your role, or what you do. Perhaps it’s what you write under your name on that “Hello, my name is _____” nametag. In short, it becomes one of the primary ways you define who you are.

Our identities serve several functions for us. They give us a sense of purpose. They define us as the protagonist in our life story. They unconsciously focus what we pay attention to, and what we filter out of our awareness.

As an individual contributor at work, you likely concentrated on acquiring all the knowledge and skills required to be good at your job. Succeeding at this provided emotional gratification, and the promotion was the recognition of a job well done.

Assuming a New Role Requires a Change in Identity

Embracing a new manager role means taking on a different identity at work, and it means letting go of the previously rewarding identity. Making a change in one of your core identities is no small thing.

It requires self-awareness and emotional adjustment. Your attention needs to refocus on what it takes to be a successful manager, not what it took to be a subject matter expert. You most likely need to acquire different knowledge and skills. Instead of, say, reading articles in your subject matter area, you may need to instead acquire knowledge in the intricacies of managing others or become proficient in the skills necessary to complete HR software.

This process can at times be painful. You may need to accept, for instance, that you are no longer the team’s subject matter authority; instead, your task is now to take pride in how one of your direct reports—often a former peer—is becoming more of an expert than you. Letting go of misplaced confidence and accepting that you are on unsteady ground is unpleasant, but humility will allow for time to adapt.

A promotion often disrupts established social dynamics, too. Your former peers are likely now your subordinates, which may strain old friendships and require a reset. And the self-assurance you may have felt in your previous role gives way to uncertainty as to whether this new role will be gratifying.

This is all normal. You should be feeling a sense of loss and grief as you begin to replace your previous identity with one that is better aligned with your new role. Mixed feelings are simply a sign that you’re still in an in-between state. Soon—hopefully—you’ll feel comfortable and fulfilled in the new role as manager, and your new identity will reflect that evolution.

Approaching the new role without conscious awareness of the identity shift required is a recipe for failure. To be a successful manager, you likely can’t continue to prioritize as you did in your individual contributor role, and you can’t simply rely on previous strengths. Instead, you need to first take a clear-eyed assessment of what knowledge, skills, and behavior are necessary in the new role.

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Asking yourself if your old behavior is aligned with the new role—and doing things differently than you’ve become accustomed to if not—will feel unnatural at first, but that is exactly what is essential in this transition stage.

Letting Go Before Grabbing On

It’s important to allow yourself an adjustment period to grieve the old identity before you and your company fully assess whether the new role and identity are a fit. Then, if the new role doesn’t work out, no one need see it as a failure.

This cannot be overstated. All too often, careers are derailed, and mental suffering is triggered, because a role/identity misalignment is wrongly labeled as a career failure.

These role and identity transitions continue at every step up the corporate hierarchy. First-time CEOs, just like first-time managers, succeed when they realize the need to evolve their identity to bring it into alignment with their new role.

To learn more about how identity shapes success in new roles, explore The Identity Blindspot on the Blindspotting blog, adapted from Martin Dubin’s book Blindspotting.