New Managers, Invest Here

When you move from from a technical leadership role to a formal people manager role, there are two crucial, but often overlooked, levels of relationships for you to invest in.

The first level of relationship is that of your new peers – those who report to the same person you do. Here’s why those direct peer relationships are so important to your success:

✅ Conflict with peers makes your boss’s job hard.
✅ Conflict with peers slows down progress towards your teams goals (and everyone else’s).
✅ When the goals of the team that reports to you are hindered by conflict between you and your peers, you lose more respect from your team members than you would if it were a top-down decision that changed your team’s goals.
✅ But if you do invest in building great relationships with your peers, then if one of your peers is selected to become your team’s manager, you’ll already have a great relationship with your boss.
✅ If you are selected to become your team’s manager, you’ll already have a great relationship with those who now report to you.
✅ If someone from the outside becomes your team’s manager, they’ll more likely hear good things about you from your peers.
✅ If your peers are leaders, too, then your relationship with them becomes a model of good relationships between your team members and their team members.

The second crucial but often overlooked level of relationships is with your boss’s peers. As long as those relationships don’t derail your relationship with your boss, here’s why those relationships are worth the investment:

✅ Good relationships with them reflects well on your boss, which improves your boss’s opinion of you.
✅ When you get promoted, you’ll already have a great relationship with your new peers, which gives you a head start on the first level of relationship we talked about.
✅ It broadens your understanding of the organization, helping you make and defend better decisions.
✅ It gives you opportunities to connect with a wider network of potential mentors and partners, while improving your visibility for potential promotion in the future.

So, spend time to get to know your peers, and your boss’s peers. Learn what’s important to them. Find ways to genuinely serve them. You’ll find it worth the investment.