Is getting promoted always the best thing to happen? There’s little doubt that many employees wouldn’t turn down a pay bump, but one author suggests that promotions aren’t always positive.
More companies are reconsidering promotion structures to include both non-management and management role tracks, HR Brew previously reported, so employees can advance their careers without necessarily jumping into people management.
But even when employees decide to take on a people management role, some of those “superpower skills” that got them promoted might work against them, according to Sabina Nawaz, executive coach, speaker, and author of You’re The Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need).
Nawaz shared with HR Brew how people pros can help employees be aware of some adverse effects of stepping into leadership.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What will HR pros learn after reading your book?
This book, for HR professionals, is a two-fold resource. One is for themselves, and the other is for the clients that they support. There are three key things in the book that reshape our thinking about power, pressure, and leadership, and particularly leading in these times. The first one is that getting promoted is often the riskiest time in your career.
The second is that it is not power, but pressure that corrupts us. Under pressure, we act out, we get shorter, we get snippier, and then power comes in, and isolates us from the impact of those actions under pressure. So, we are often the last ones to find out that we’re actually doing damage and becoming innocent saboteurs for our teams, as well as our business results, because nobody wants to tell someone in a position of power what they don’t want to hear.
To the first point, what do you mean by promotions are risky?
When we get promoted, of course, it’s obviously an occasion for great celebration. At the same time, we haven’t changed, but our position has changed. We’re in a new level, and we have new rules. If people are not aware of that, it comes [back] to bite them.
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Let’s say somebody is really attentive to details. It’s a superpower of theirs. That is what got them noticed and promoted up the ranks. Now, suddenly, as a manager, they’re going to be viewed as a micromanager because while we haven’t changed, the necks that are craning up to look at us, their view of us becomes less charitable, and also, sometimes people feel a sense of threat when somebody is in a position of power because they have so much control over our lives.
What does a good or effective manager look like from your perspective?
I don’t know that there is such a thing as a purely good manager or bad manager. They both reside under us, and it goes back to one of the earlier points I mentioned around pressure, that pressure actually changes how we act.
There were times in my career where people told me I was the best boss they’d ever had, and there were times in my career where people told me I was the worst boss they ever had. Actually, they didn’t tell me that, they told other people.
Did I have a personality transplant? No. Did I act differently? Yes. Did those actions change because of the amount of pressure I was under? Absolutely.
I’m not saying we should use that as an excuse, but to recognize that we’re capable of both types of behaviors we just have to be mindful of how we manage pressure. Because, if you think about it, pressure is also great. Diamonds are forged under pressure. It’s like an invitation to grow. We don’t realize the brilliance, the resilience, the creativity that we have unless we’re under pressure. So it doesn’t have to define you, it can refine you.