Page 11 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

viii Preface

others with these tools and concepts. We share them with you for your use
and with the goal of helping even more leaders make smooth and effective
landings as they assume new, different, and broader responsibilities.
This book is about what happens in the first 12 months after you’ve been
promoted to a new management or leadership role. You’re moving up! It’s
about that exciting and challenging time in your professional life when your
responsibilities change, expand, and usually become much more challenging
for you. If it is your first management role, you will experience the strange-
ness of changing from an us to a them, when you opt for group over individ-
ual responsibility. For more experienced and more senior executives, every
new role has its own challenges, often with higher stakes and implications.
Whether you are a new manager or a more experienced leader, you are often
tested to the limits of your ability and confidence during the weeks and months
that follow your appointment. You will certainly stretch your professional and
leadership comfort zones. This is a period of hazardous duty, and Just Pro-
moted! is designed to help you at every turn.
For the first-time manager, this is a period of professional and personal
change unlike any other in your career. In a relatively short time, no more than
a few months, you will negotiate the rocky, treacherous channel that separates
the knowledgeable, motivated, functional, or technical phase of your career
from your new role as manager and leader of others. No longer responsible
solely for the performance and quality of your own work, you now have to fig-
ure out how to help others achieve at least that same level of skill, motivation,
and knowledge that earned you the promotion. No longer are you the effec-
tive or master professional; now you are in charge.
Whether you are new to management and leadership responsibility, or a
veteran of numerous previous leadership roles and transitions, you will be
observed and judged by your stakeholders with most every move you make and
every decision you take. All leaders are watched. Newly promoted leaders are
watched even more closely. There is great interest in everything you do . . . for
some good and, unfortunately, not so good reasons. You will be judged on how
well you manage this difficult transition. Your new responsibilities will test and
challenge you as a person and as a professional. This period will likely have a
lasting effect on your career and your personal brand as others assess your per-
formance, your interactions, and your potential as a leader.
This book is designed to be a very practical resource for both new and expe-
rienced managers and leaders with titles such as manager, group leader, depart-