The First 6 Months in a New Leadership Role: 3 Shifts You Need to Make (Ep 310)

There are three specific shifts every leader needs to make in their first six months in a new role. In this episode, we’re gonna cover these three shifts so you don’t miss them, because if you are late and not aware that these shifts need to happen in the first six months, you might be losing credibility as a leader.

My name is Ramona Shah and I’m the host of the ATU Track podcast. 

Now I wanna be clear. I said the shifts that need to happen within the first six months. There’s a lot of talk about the first 90 days and you can find a lot of information on the manager track about that initial three months period as well and what you need to do and what you need to avoid

in order to set yourself up for success

and earn trust and respect with your team and your senior leaders. But what we’re gonna cover today are the first six months in working and supporting hundreds, if not thousands, of leaders through their leadership journey, I’ve noticed that these shifts are often overlooked or delayed beyond the six month period. Because what happens in the six months is that expectations shift, kind of the grace period is over, and your team, your boss and your peers are no longer evaluating you on potential. They’re now actually evaluating your patterns.

I’m gonna give you a quick preview on what we’re going to cover. First, validation seeking, and why it is quietly eroding your authority.

Second, strategic thinking and what it actually looks like in practice during the first six months. And then third, your leadership philosophy and team norms, and why being vague about them is costing you. Okay, now let’s dive into the first one. The validation trap. When you were new, it made sense to check in.

Often you might ask your boss, Hey, does this approach make sense? You looped in people early because you did not want to get it wrong ’cause you didn’t understand maybe the systems, the process, , the culture, the context, the history of projects, all that was appropriate early on. But many managers never outgrow that pattern,

because you can do this for the first three to six months, but not beyond. So the tricky thing about validation seeking is that it does not always look like insecurity. Sometimes it looks like collaboration, right? You are CCing your manager on decisions that actually you could and maybe should own, but you are framing your recommendations, ask questions, and you are running ideas by different people before you commit. And the difference between collaboration and validation seeking is who owns the decision and what truly motivates you to go out and seek that kind of validation or that input.

If you are asking for input to improve your thinking and to keep people in the loop. In an attempt to have strong stakeholder management, that is collaboration. But if you are asking because you need someone else to say yes, go ahead before you will move and before you feel secure enough to make a decision or you need some kind of backup, it feels like a safety net, that you run it by a peer or by your boss, and so you’re not the only one with that opinion.

If that is a true motive, then this is validation seeking. And if you continue that pattern beyond six months, people will notice, your boss will notice, and they may not say it directly, but what they’re thinking is this, I promoted or hired this person so they can own it. Why are they still checking in with me?

How do I let them know that they need to own more? I do appreciate the updates, but they start to pick up a subtle insecurity, and your team may notice this too, right? When their manager, IE, you constantly differ upward. If you say, Hey, that’s a great idea,

let me discuss this with Anna, the boss. Then you are signaling that you are not actually the one making decisions here and what might happen is that people, especially people who might be your peers, who should be coming to you, might start to go to your boss because they realize you always refer back to the boss.

So why not just go to your boss directly? So here’s how you can build some awareness around this. Track the decisions that you make in a week. At the end of the day, what kind of decisions did you make and how many of those did you own outright versus how many did you escalate upwards or require some kind of validation from other people.

If more than half require someone else’s sign off and they’re not actually the high stake super cross-functional calls that you’re making, that then is an indication that there’s a pattern you need to break. Again, early on in the first couple months, this is totally valid because you’re likely missing a lot of context.

It’s about catching the right time to move from, what do you think I should do to here is what I’m planning to do and here is why I wanted to flag it for visibility. But unless you see something I’m missing, I will move forward.

So a very different position that I’m presenting now a few months in than what I might have done in the first couple months. And so that change in phrasing and how you show up and present things will change how people perceive you. And it does clearly state I have a point of view and I have done the thinking and I trust my own judgment based on my vast experience before even coming into this role enough to act on it.

There’s also a bit of a covert version of this to pay attention to, and this is the behind the scenes validation where you might privately sort of pull colleagues or test the waters, sidebar conversations. You wanna try to build nces.

Before you ever put your name on something, and that can be smart stakeholder management. It’s kind of the office politics, right? The behind the scenes, informal conversations to influence. That sounds good, but you gotta make sure that you are clear on your motive because if you are doing it so that you would never stand alone if a decision didn’t work out. Like if you make a decision and then you feel like you had to do all this polling. So that at that point you would have some backup, if that’s the motive, catch yourself.

This is sort of the validation seeking that’s done below the surface. In a less visible way, be honest with yourself about which one it is to have awareness and then be able to shift. The second one is moving from execution to strategic thinking. So when you are new, your value comes from getting things done and learning things, especially as you move into a new role, right? You were fast early on, and you wanna show that you pick up things fast, that you are reliable, that you’re organized.

That you’re asking good questions, that you’re getting sort of like early wins in that you are making some movement and progress and you’re able to execute on the team’s responsibilities that happens early on but then after about three months until about six months in, the expectations start to shift.

And strategic thinking is one of those phrases that gets thrown around in development conversations without anyone really explaining what it means in daily practice. So I wanna make it really clear.

After the first three months, the second set of three months here in that six month period is about demonstrating strategic thinking, which is the ability to connect what your team does today to what the organization needs. In 6, 12, 24 months or even beyond. And to make trade offs based on that connection and that forward looking perspective.

And it’s less about having a five year vision deck, although that’s great too, but it is about the quality of your reasoning when you decide what to prioritize, what to say no to, and how you frame your team’s work to senior leaders when you demonstrate to them or talk to them about what your team does.

And as a leader in a new role, in that first six month period, you will have to get to that strategic thinking level and be able to present to your manager and other senior leaders what kind of strategic goals you’re setting, the direction that you want your team to take in the, risks that you foresee and the challenges as well.

Now you wanna weave some of this strategic thinking into the day-to-day conversations. So for example, before your next team meeting, identify the two business priorities for your department. Then look at the team’s current workload and ask, Hey, do our efforts truly map to these priorities?

And if not, engage in a conversation on what kind of shifts might need to happen when you present an update or a proposal. Don’t lead with the activity. First pay. We completed X and we shipped Y and so forth. Instead, demonstrate the strategic perspective first. Lead with impact and trade-offs. For example, we focus on X because it supports this business goal or this strategic direction.

That also meant we deprioritized why, and here is why that was the right call to make. In the broader context of the strategic objectives in essence, you wanna have a point of view on what is coming you. You do not need to predict the future, but you should be able to say.

You know, based on what I’m seeing or based on what I’ve learned over the last three months, here’s what I think we should be paying attention to in Q3 and beyond that is what strategic sounds like. And by the way, many leaders are also expected, either, you know, very explicitly or sort of implied into their first six months period that they will present a strategic plan for their team.

So. Uh, if that’s not on your radar and you are in the first six months, make sure that you check in with your manager of what is expected and what would be helpful. Be proactive about this. ’cause this is sometimes just implied and you might not be aware of because you are in the fire drill and the execution mode.

One of those mistakes that many managers make is waiting for someone to tell them to think bigger, right? To receive the feedback. Like, hey, they’re great in execution, but I haven’t really heard them talk about where they see the, the team go, or the organization go, or the department.

Don’t expect people to send you calendar invites for that. You have to one. Driving this proactively.

A quick pause here, if what we’re covering today is resonating, and if you are someone who wants to take this all the way and you’re fully invested in your leadership growth. If you’re new to leadership or in your first two years, I wanna tell you about the leadership accelerator.

This is our 12 week manager readiness program that we run specifically for new and early stage managers. People who are good, , great their chops and now need to become good at leading. We go deep on exactly this kind of thing, like building strategic credibility, owning decisions without overlying on your boss, and defining how you lead with all the practices such as one-on-one meetings, feedback.

Conflict resolution, delegating, managing time so that your team actually knows what to expect from you, and will grow alongside you. This program is cohort based so that you don’t grow through this alone, but in a small group of other managers in similar situations it includes live coaching, on demand training, and one-on-one support.

So that what you learn actually sticks. So if you’re a manager who knows the grace period is over and you wanna lead with more clarity and effectiveness, then check out the link in the description. Okay, back to our episode.

the third shift you need to make in the first six months is that you need to get explicit about how you lead. Most managers operate on an unspoken philosophy.

They have values and preferences and expectations, we all do, but they never set them out loud. Right? They’re leaving kind of their team. To guess what those are, and guessing will inevitably create friction or a trial and error approach that’s just not necessary.

Your leadership philosophy is your answer to What do I believe about how people should work together? What do I expect from myself and from this team, and what can they expect of me? Now, this doesn’t have to be a really long manifesto, but it should be clear enough that a new person joining your team could understand within a very short time period

how things work here, what gets rewarded, how to best engage with you and what won’t be tolerated, also, what you expect around communication, how to best reach you, but how to decide on deadlines and how to deal with disagreements.

Because here’s the tagline to this shift. An unspoken standard is not a standard. 

And because your philosophy is something that tends to evolve over time. You don’t have to get all the details nailed on day one or before you share it. You can start with a lightweight version and just take some notes and write things down. For example, write answers to the following. Four questions. What do I value most in how my team works together? For example, we direct or polite ownership or to people ask for permission. What does proactive communication look like? How do we run meetings? All of that.

Number two, what are my non-negotiables? For example, never surprise me in a meetings, right? Always send agendas. Always flag specific blockers that you might have to meet deadlines, way in advance. Come with a recommendation, not just with a question. Those are all things that may sound so intuitive and logical to you, but people don’t know that we don’t all operate with the same assumptions.

Okay, that’s number two. Number three. How do I make decisions? Do you want input from the team before you decide, or will you decide quickly and then adjust as you go? Or should the person closest to the work decide unless it affects another team? Get really clear on how decisions are being made.

And then the fourth one is, what does good look like on this team? And we’re not talking about the results, but the way that we operate day to day. What would someone observe if they were shadowing us for a week and all the practices that actually make us a high performing team? What are those things? So get really clear on the behaviors that lead to high performance in your opinion.

And once you have your answers, share them right in a team meeting in a one-on-one, it’s, it becomes a shared document. And especially it relates to that last point around the behaviors or the norms, so to speak. It’s a good idea to ask for the team’s input as well. ’cause ultimately, you as a team should come up with the collaborative norms and the behaviors that f the high performing environment.

But you as a leader can also come in and kind of start that conversation based on your own expectations. Your philosophy doesn’t have to be perfect, right? I said that earlier. It’s an iterative process, but once you put something down and you’re communicating those things explicitly, your team no longer has to guess, and they actually start operating from a shared set of expectations.

Now, of course, the big thing here is that you have to hold yourself to it. If you say you value directness, but then you get visibly annoyed when someone pushes back on your idea in a meeting. That contradiction will undermine your entire philosophy, right? So once you make it explicit, your team will watch what you do and how much that aligns with what you say that you value.

So be mindful of that. Your philosophy is something that should be your compass, your sort of guide to how you show up. So with that, we’ve covered the three shifts that matter most in the first six months. Now here is the mindset underneath all three of those shifts.

When you were new, your cha was to learn systems, prove you belong. You understand the systems, a steep learning curve. Prove that you earn your teams and your senior leaders trust and respect. Then your job and responsibilities turn into being someone who shapes the system, right? You are now defining how your team operates. You’re influencing your owning decisions without it. Safety net ’cause you’re actively leading. And to demonstrate that you are thinking beyond the next tasks, beyond the time horizon that might be on your team’s radar, that you are the one who’s thinking ahead

and you’re also not auditioning for the role anymore, right? You are in the role and at some point, especially as you elevate as a leader, people won’t judge your competence, so they won’t be on the lookout for your competence, the technical competence. They’re now looking for your leadership competence.

That’s the thing that is in question, not your technical knowledge, because you wouldn’t be hired into this role if the technical skills were missing. So that’s no longer a question. You have to now prove your leadership

and in the first six months, what we’ve just covered in those three shifts is exactly. This that you move away from just getting a hang of what this role is and what the company’s about to demonstrating leadership. So I suggest and try one thing. Pick the shift that hit closest to home. If it’s validation, seeking making a decision without checking upward.

If it is strategic thinking such as reframing an update from activity to impact, to weave in that strategic per perspective into your communication. Or if it is your leadership philosophy, write down your non-negotiables and share them with your team. Small moves done consistently are how your leadership reputation gets built.

And with that, if this episode was helpful, please share it with a fellow manager, a friend, the colleague, or someone else who’s in that in-between zone or about to take on a new role. I’m confident that this as a reminder or some foresight will help them be set up for success in their new role. With that said, I wish you a great week and we’ll be back next week with another episode of The Manager Track podcast. Bye for now. 

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