Managing Former Peers? Have These 4 Conversations First

In 2011, I got on a one-way flight from Zurich to San Francisco. I had just been promoted, and I was about to lead a team for the very first time. I remember staring out the window at those enormous puffy clouds at the time and thinking, what the heck are you doing? How do you think you can lead a team of people who are more talented than you?

But there was also another voice deep inside that was the self-confident voice of me, the one that had no problem exposing myself and putting myself into vulnerable, uncomfortable situations. Things that I’ve learned along the way. And that has helped me a lot throughout my early career and through my education. Now, I was in this new leadership role, and about a year and a half, maybe two years later, I realized that I had damaged some of the relationships of the people that I used to work alongside, so my former peers.

And I was actually feeling more stressed in that manager position and more insecure than I had been in any job before that, when I was an individual contributor.

Now there are typically two reasons why first-time managers struggle just like I did. One is either the overconfident new manager who feels like they’re gonna come in, throw around their weight, that there’s a sense of confidence, sometimes comes across as arrogance, where they don’t feel like they need to learn anything, and the skills that got them promoted, the skills that made them a high performing IC are the same skills that will also help them be successful as a leader.

And then there’s the opposite side. There’s the insecure new manager, the one who wants to be liked, the one who will treat their former peers as peers even when they move into the leadership position. The one that will leave too much unspoken, too much unsaid, who will avoid the tough feedback, who will not be clear with expectations, who won’t be decisive. Both of these situations are challenging and will lead to a stressful experience as a first-time manager.

So in this episode today, I wanna talk about why the transition from an IC into a manager position, especially if you’re going to manage your former peers just like I was, is a trap almost every new manager falls into. And we’re gonna talk about the four conversations that help you get out of it and prevent this from happening for you so that you can set yourself up for success as a first-time manager. My name is Ramona Shaw, and I’m the host of The Manager Track podcast.

So let me tell you how badly this went for me specifically my first year or two. One day, I got into an argument with one of my direct reports in a team meeting. It was about deadlines and expectations and all of that good stuff. And after the meeting, I asked him to stay behind, and I used this as an opportunity to lecture him about what it meant to work in this job at this company, which was fast-paced and performance-driven. And as you can probably imagine, it did not land well, and it was completely my fault.

Looking back, I can see exactly what happened. That argument was possible in the first place because nobody had ever made that expectation explicit. And then when these implied expectations weren’t met, the lecture afterwards was really me trying to install something in 90 seconds what should have been said in week one of this person on the job.

Now, in my book, The Confident and Competent New Manager, I split expectations into two kinds, right? Those explicit expectations, those are the things you have actually said, like the objectives, the deadlines, the deliverables, how success gets measured, maybe KPIs, maybe the job description and responsibilities.

And then there are the implicit expectations which are everything you assume people already know, because to you it’s just common sense. Like, they must know that. They must do that. They must be aware that that’s how we operate. But when a leader does not convert implicit expectations into explicit ones, there is naturally some misalignment, some misunderstandings going to happen. There’s going to be wasted effort, mutual frustration, and eventually distrust. Not occasionally, not possibly, but this is going to be inevitable.

Now, think about what that means when you are managing people that you used to sit next to, right? Your former peers. You have probably for years or months shared these unspoken rules with those people. How you talk about the leadership team, who covers for whom when something slips, what gets said in the hallway, versus what gets said in a meeting. Every single one of those rules is now up for renegotiation, and you have discussed exactly none of them with your team, most likely.

So if you’re moving from a peer position into a manager role, these implicit expectations need to be addressed again. Now, the reason why most people avoid this and don’t really go there is because our minds are built to avoid discomfort. That’s basically the default setting.

So naming something that will change or is changing, and for us to be sort of in the driver’s seat of that, is often uncomfortable. So what we tend to do is we put it off. We think it’s not that important. It’s not a big deal. We’ll figure it out. We’re all adults, not gonna be a problem. And it feels like we’re making a very deliberate, good, solid decision to not have that conversation.

And it might also feel like you’re being sensitive to the situation because it could be a little awkward to talk about the fact that you’re now in the manager position. So let’s just not address the elephant in the room if you don’t have to.

But meanwhile, the silence of not talking about what’s changing and how these expectations are changing is the problem. Because when people do not have information, they do not wait for it. They don’t know that there is a gap. So when people don’t know that there’s information that they don’t have access to, they don’t wait for it. If they know there’s information they don’t have access to, they will fill the gap with their own theories, and those theories and stories then become sort of the terms of the relationship.

Either way, if there are expectations in the room, said or unsaid, they will shape that relationship. So the only real question is whether you set them or your team does it for you, right? Whether you’re the one who puts it out there, or whether people make them up in their head. So that is a crucial conversation to have, what are the explicit expectations? And then right next to it, what are all the implicit expectations that we need to take care of?

Now let’s talk about the friendly manager trap. So this is the second conversation. Here is what the trap really looks like. In my book, I use a simple matrix to describe four different management approaches. There are two axes. One is productivity and the other one is rapport. With that together, there’s sort of a two by two matrix, right? Four boxes. In the top left, we have the do it all manager. This person does not delegate. They execute, and they solve problems for everybody else, but they don’t actually delegate anything of significance to the team.

Now, the team still performs because they do some menial tasks, and the manager does all the big things. So from the outside, it actually looks fine, but that type of manager will not scale, and the rapport between them and the growth of an entire team will stay low. ’Cause the message that this manager sends, without really meaning to, is that nobody here is trusted enough to do the big work, the significant work.

So that’s the first one. The bottom left is the micromanager. Now, if you listen on the audio to this, I would recommend quickly checking the YouTube link to go see that section on the screen. So the bottom left is the micromanager, and this manager does delegate, and they dictate both what gets done and how it gets done.

Now, in this situation, productivity drops, and rapport drops with it as well. So none of that is good ’cause the manager has to coordinate and orchestrate the whole thing. People can’t be productive on their own. Their manager is the main bottleneck. Plus, no one likes the micromanager, okay? So not good rapport.

In the top right is the coaching manager, and that is the box we are all trying to get to, which is productivity high and rapport high. The coaching manager is the one that supports the team in their development, in their growth, not just delegating work and tell them what to do and how to do it, but really help them become more independent and autonomous in their work through the coaching approach.

So we have one more box left, which is the box at the bottom right, and this is the friendly manager. This person praises. They offer flexibility. They support people. They build genuinely strong rapport. People love them. But they also avoid anything that might ruffle feathers. This is the one I encourage you to really sit with because it’s the easiest trap to fall into.

In fact, my experience with having coached and supported thousands of new managers in the last 10 years, this is the most common mistake new managers make, and it is the worst by a distance when you are leading former peers or people who have more technical expertise or longer tenure than you do.

So here’s what that manager kind of has running through their head. So see if this sounds familiar. In their head, they’re thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m the only one who feels this way. I should just, you know, let it go if something bothers me.” Or, “If I raise a concern, it will turn into an argument, and I don’t have the time or the energy to argue.”

Or, “You know what? It’s not a good time to share this feedback right now. I’ll wait and maybe it’ll just… it was just a day, like a one-off thing.” Or, “If I speak up and I say what I really think, I will hurt their feelings and make their job, their work harder, or they won’t like me anymore.”

Now, every one of those sounds like a reasonable argument in the moment in their heads. But over time, they will add up, and mediocre work becomes the accepted new standard. And your A players, they will start resenting the fact that you are covering for people and tolerating people who are not pulling their own weight.

And with that, you will develop a permanent gap between what you actually want people to do and what you’re willing to ask them to do, and that huge gap is the trap. Now, one of those managers that I quote in my book put it about as plainly as it can be put. She said, “As a peer, she was popular. As a leader, that was no longer available to her because the job requires making decisions that some people will not like.” Being candid is being kind, and she had to literally learn this the hard way, but now she can see it so clearly, and she acknowledges that understanding this was a game changer for her leadership.

Quick pause here. If this is landing and you want to take it all the way, let me tell you about the Leadership Accelerator. This is our 12-week program that we run for new and early-stage managers, people who are good at their jobs and now need to get good at leading.

We go deep on exactly those topics we just covered, like running the reset conversation with a former peer, how to navigate that elephant in the room, holding a standard with somebody who has been here twice as long as you have, and the list goes on. It’s a cohort-based program, so you’re not doing this alone, and we combine live coaching in a small group and one-on-one with on-demand training, so that you both get the important frameworks and the knowledge that you need as a manager, as well as the personalized support and learning with other people who are exactly in the same boat.

To learn more, check out the link in the show notes.

So let’s move on to the third part here and let me get practical. Four things have to be renegotiated out loud with every person who used to be your peer. And I don’t mean like you need to say those in a team meeting. You need to actually sit individually with every person on the team in your first two weeks to address this. Number one is information.

You might have been able to share everything, but now as a manager, there are things you cannot pass along. And if you do not name that, your discretion gets read as coldness or could be as if you’re freezing out people. Because there are going to be things that you will know that you cannot pass along, and that may feel different from how it used to be with that person.

So you can say all that and then add, “Hey, when I can tell you something, I will. And I will also tell you what I cannot say or when I cannot say anymore.” So that is information, the amount of information and the timeliness of information being shared.

The second one is about venting. Yes, you used to complain about leadership together. You are now in leadership. That is a very big difference. You cannot keep venting about leadership when you’re part of leadership. If you do keep venting with your former peers, now direct reports, you will undermine your own decisions, your own authority.

So you might need to address this and say, “Hey, I am not going to be the person you can complain to about a decision I made or agreed to. I do wanna hear any disagreements directly and would rather hear it from you and hear it transparently than not hear it at all, but this won’t be venting like it might have been in the past.” So that’s a very important distinction to make.

The third one is about decision rights. In the past, you used to have equal say. You now have final say on some things, and at the same time, you probably genuinely want their inputs on some of those as well. Now almost all the conflict I see in someone’s first year in a manager position comes from nobody really having drawn that line. For example, it starts with the priorities. Look, how we allocate the work and who does what used to be someone else’s decision. Now it’s mine. I’m going to own that. How the actual work gets done, that is still yours, and I’m not going to touch it or interfere. But the priorities of the work, that is something that I’m now having to decide.

And that’s just one quick example of how the decisions need to be addressed and what decisions are you now making and when are you involving them, and anything else that is changing when you start managing former peers.

The fourth one is actually addressing the friendship or the relationship that you had itself, and to do so out loud rather than sort of implied through your behavior like, “Eh, no, I don’t wanna go for coffee,” and declining those invites for lunch and so forth.

Instead, address it in the first couple of weeks on the job. “Hey, I still want to be friends,” or, “Hey, I still value our relationship. I’m also not going to pretend that I’m not your manager, ’cause that would do us both a disservice. When those two things pull against each other,” right? So when they’re contradicting, “the manager one will have to take over ’cause that’s my job, and I would rather tell you that now than for you to find out in a performance review,” right?

“And so I want to be really transparent about how some of these things change. Sometimes I’m gonna wear the manager hat, sometimes I’m gonna wear the friend hat. But when things are unclear or there’s a gray zone, I will have to represent the manager, and that means some of the things in our friendship or our relationship are going to be different than they used to be.”

And I want to specifically call out two things to add to that conversation. First, get specific about behavioral standards. Like, hey, how fast do we respond to emails and chat? Is it okay to message after hours? What happens on a sick day? Who do you alert, and how do you alert them? All of that may sound trivial, but it is where former peers and their new managers generate a lot of friction. ’Cause people assume that they already know the answer.

But if you are in the manager position, that answer will now change ’cause it will be you who’s guiding more, who’s directing more. And so things that maybe your previous manager did, you might not wanna have it that way, and so that needs to be addressed.

The second one, and this is one that most managers skip. Once you have stated your expectations, ask what theirs are of you. That is what keeps the whole conversation from landing as a sort of a top-down approach, right? We’re really thinking about, yes, you are in the leadership position, but we’re also operating with this idea of horizontal leadership.

We’re all equals, and so none of this is like my way or the highway. This is like I am telling you and I want to be explicit with you, and I invite you to also explicitly state your expectations of me. Now, then we will try to find as much common ground as possible and come to an agreement of what to do with everything else.

And especially if you did have a best friend at work, for example, teams will read differentiated treatment as fair when they understand the basis of the difference in treatment. Then it seems to be clearly about performance. “Hey, these are your expectations because you have more seniority. These are your expectations because of that other scenario or circumstance.” But when those differentiated treatments aren’t explained or addressed clearly, then people will assume it’s favoritism.

They will read into that. And the perception of favoritism will be the thing that damages trust more than anything else. It’s not even about how you treat them differently. It is really the perception of it that’s going to be the problem. And this is a really easy one to be exposed to because your team already knows exactly who your friends are. They know who you’ve hung out with and who you shared information with confidentially before you were promoted. So if you do treat people differently, which we should, because people are different, you will need to make sure the reasons are clear and make it about the work, right?

Not everyone gets the same pay, not everyone gets the same responsibilities, not everyone gets the same flexibility. That is normal, but it has to be visible and clear. Now, I wanna add a quick note on the person who wanted your job, if that’s the case for you. People will always act in a way that makes sense to them in the moment. It might not be appropriate or effective, but in their own head it is reasonable. So in their version, they got passed over and now they take direction from somebody with the same tenure or even less or whatever reason they feel like this was unfair. That is not just about a bruised ego.

It’s literally that for many of them, this situation doesn’t read as fair. It doesn’t read like it was the right choice. To them, they felt they were better positioned. They felt they should have gotten the job. They put their name in it. Maybe over time, right, you win them over and they realize like, “Oh yeah, they were right. I wasn’t ready yet.” But in that moment early on, they may not quite feel that yet. So it’s okay to name it and to check in with them. For example, you could say, “Hey, I know you applied for this role and now you are reporting to me. If I was in your shoes, I would be doing the math about my own future here too. So tell me what you want next and whether there is a version of this year where you get closer to working with me in achieving the goal that you are pursuing.”

And so, you’re addressing it and then you’re tossing the ball back to them so that they have to give you an answer of what that would look like in order for them to win through this decision and you being in this role as well.

Now, in this section here, I covered four specific things that you need to cover in addition to making sure that you’re not falling into the trap of the friendly manager and that you’re having this first and most important conversation about the explicit and the implicit expectations.

Now let me quickly add a couple pieces of research here. The first one explains why this transition is so draining. There is work in personnel psychology on relationships that carry a friendship and a working relationship at the same time. Those relationships lift performance because of the increase in trust, and they drag on it through what the researchers call maintenance difficulty.

So there’s a measurable negative effect running through this emotional exhaustion of trying to maintain that friendship. So the closeness in itself might not even be what really costs you. What costs you is holding these two sets of expectations and two tracks of relationships in your head all day, every day, without ever having agreed which one applies when. Which is exactly what those conversations I shared earlier are designed to eliminate.

Then there’s the research on how we size each other up, and that’s from Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick. It says that we run two assessments on everybody essentially. We ask what are this person’s intentions towards me, and are they capable of acting on them? So we’re looking at warmth and competence. The standard finding is that most leaders overweight competence. Without trust in place first between manager and employee, this may trigger fear or resentment if the only thing that we see is competence.

So the usual advice for someone who is highly competent and moves into this new manager position is to actually start with leading with warmth, with showing the positive intention you have towards them, and only then your ability to act on them. Now the only exception is that if you are managing a former peer that you had a good relationship with, your warmth, so to speak, that trust that people have in you, is already banked. You already built that up. No one’s questioning that, assuming the relationship was good. So you can kinda stand on top of that.

What your team has no read on though at that time is that other question, can this person decide, hold a line, and go to bat for us? Can they act on these good intentions and the care that they have for me? That is basically the account that’s running empty on day one that you have to prove to them.

And every friendly manager, like we’ve talked about earlier, they will have a hard time with this because they try to sort of extend that warmth and that relationship, but they’re not proving that they can act on and stand up for what is necessary in order to demonstrate that care and that support for the team.

So these are just two quick anecdotes on how research and psychology and behavioral science are supporting why these initial conversations and the friendly manager trap and the expectation setting are so important early on, especially if you are leading former peers.

Now, let me leave you with this reframe I wish somebody had given me on that airplane flight when I was moving to San Francisco in order to take on that team. Staying liked as a peer and maintaining those relationships will rob your team of a manager.

Every person reporting to you needs something only a manager can give to them. A decision actually made, a line held with another department, an honest answer about whether they are really tracking toward that promotion, and the list goes on. One of the managers that I featured in my book said he was kind, supportive, and empathetic, but then he realized that he was not hired to be a friend. And that it occurred to him that he had never seen a line on a performance evaluation for how good a friend he was to his direct reports. That is so important.

And here’s maybe the line for the moments when you are choosing clarity over comfort. I would rather you be annoyed with me now than blindsided by me in six months. So name all these changes first. Say them out loud before your team has to fill the gaps and come up with their own stories.

If this was useful, please like and subscribe to be alerted of our future episodes of The Manager Track podcast.

Success and comfort are opposing pursuits. As a leader, you don’t even get to choose much, right? You wanna be successful. That means effectiveness is what we’re aiming for, not comfort. So have those necessary conversations that won’t feel comfortable but are going to be what helps you be successful and effective as a new manager to your former peers.

With that, I’ll see you next week with another episode of The Manager Track podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out at archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my bestselling book, The Confident and Competent New Manager: How to Quickly Rise to Success in Your First Leadership Role. Check it out at archova.org/books, or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there.