“We thought you were one of us.”

When I hear about managers who suffer from promotion remorse, one of the frequent causes is the feeling that they’ve betrayed their team members by becoming a manager.

At first, the team celebrates your promotion. Finally one of them will get into management and be able to stand up for the individual contributors.

Next thing you know, you’re exposed to the complexities of business. You’re called to participate in the hard decisions that force painful tradeoffs. Your shield from the responsibility for consequences has evaporated. When “management” makes a decision, that includes you now. Whether you reluctantly supported a hard decision or felt compelled to disagree and commit anyway, your role now has you announcing unwelcome decisions to your former peers.

Still bearing no responsibility for consequences, they feel free to criticize the actions of “management.” And now, that includes you. They may even accuse you of betrayal.

For some, this experience makes them wish they never accepted a management role.

Do you have to betray your team to become a manager? I don’t believe so.

First, you can and should represent the interests of your team while decisions are being made.

Second, if management still makes a decision you don’t understand that appears to hurt your team, your team’s most helpful response is to adapt to it, not to fight it. You work on their behalf when you help them respond this way.

Third, their perception of betrayal is not reality as long as you continue to serve them as you lead. Sometimes the best thing you can do to serve your team is to build new, strong relationships with the leaders of other teams. This is something I’ve talked about in other videos.

When you build strong peer relationships and learn to represent your team to the company while representing company decisions to your team, you can learn to overcome the feeling of betrayal and avoid promotion remorse.

If you’d like to explore your specific situation further, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.