Worth Reading – The trap of being promoted from within

This is something I think people often forget when they join a team and get promoted. It’s also something that the leader who promoted them takes for granted:

https://www.modernleader.is/p/the-trap-of-being-promoted-from-within

As many of you know, I moved into a leadership role at the end of 2025, but it wasn’t quite like this. We were forming a new team, so while it consisted of people I knew, we all knew I’d face a learning curve as I tried something new for the firm.

Even still, I was caught by surprise by how many things I thought I understood that I didn’t really understand. Because I had never sat in that seat. (Technically, the seat didn’t exist.) When you get the title, people will bring you things and hand off responsibility to things that you didn’t know existed. Even though you were sitting right there, in the team that you now lead, you don’t know how many things the previous person in that chair never bothered to tell you about, or the relationships across other teams that made their life easier that you need to build. Many of those things didn’t just happen; effort went into knowing what to do and who to talk to.

That knowledge doesn’t always make its way down into the team, but now that you’re in charge, you’re going to need to figure it out.

I’ve talked many times about the importance of training new managers, and how most organizations don’t do it well enough, if at all. There should probably also be a module in that training for “What you think you know but don’t.”

Also, this is a really good reason for leaders to talk about what they do and for direct reports to ask many questions.

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