Congratulations! You’ve proven expertise and capability in your field, nurtured those you manage and delivered things competently.
You’ve been rewarded with a role where you have less direct control of what happens, weaker ties to your team, and more often than not shared responsibility for outcomes (while remaining accountable for them nonetheless).
Bonuses of this position include: superiors with hidden agendas, distrust of former peers, and increasingly subjective assessments of your performance.
You’ve probably never operated like this before. And there is often surprisingly little scaffolding for learning how.
Promotion into leadership can feel like being in a car that has just driven off a cliff: still sailing forward on momentum, but steeling yourself for gravity to win out.
If you’re feeling out of your depth, perhaps that’s understandable. But rising to your new role has less to do with gaining new capabilities, and more about tapping into those you already have.
Fear makes you dumb
When someone tells me they feel “out of their depth”, I think of my daughter in the swimming pool pushing herself a tad deeper than she can manage.
As she goes a bit by bit deeper, she can keep her toes bouncing on the bottom for security. But there comes a point where she can’t do it. The situation has drastically changed, and she can’t go back. And at that point, she’s frantically kicking her legs to keep her face out of water.
Something similar happens to a lot of new leaders. The problem isn’t necessarily their capability, but that the situation has drastically changed and how they used to operate doesn’t work. This feels threatening.
Under threat, our bodies activate the fight-or-flight response (now expanded to fight, flight, freeze and fawn in light of new evidence. All you really need to know about that is that social scientists plainly don’t understand a good slogan when they have one).
This response is fantastic at preserving our resources and ensuring we survive. Among other things it impacts what regions of the brain get increased or decreased blood flow. And unfortunately an area that gets decreased flow is the pre-frontal cortex.
This means that under threat, our attention narrows. Our ability to think flexibly, weigh competing information, and exercise considered judgement can deteriorate.
These are, unfortunately, exactly the capacities required of a leader operating in a fast-moving, high-stakes and information-poor environment.
The turnaround
A lot of the distress comes from some version of “I’m doing this wrong” or “everyone else knows something I don’t”. That feels exposing because, while only certain people may be qualified to judge your technical competence, practically everybody feels qualified to judge your leadership.
I think it helps to be reductive about one part of the solution. You need to become better at managing your physical and emotional state during ambiguity and pressure, so you can access more of the judgement you already possess.
I’m not about to prescribe mindfulness. There’s good evidence for it, but personally I can’t get along with it, so I’d feel hypocritical recommending it as the answer.
Instead, start noticing what happens when you feel eyes on you.
What happens in your body?
What thoughts appear?
Do you talk too much, go quiet, agree too quickly, over-prepare or spend hours replaying a meeting afterwards?
Simply noticing these patterns begins to create an early-warning system. With practice, they become less dominant and you have more room to choose what you do next.
There isn’t a universal period after which a new leadership role should suddenly feel comfortable. I’d pay more attention to whether situations that terrified you three months ago are becoming more manageable, whether you recover faster when things go badly, and whether you’re getting more comfortable making decisions without perfect information.
