Responsibilities New Managers Must Adopt When Promoted

Shifting from an individual contributor to a leadership role can be difficult, even under the best of circumstances. Individual contributors often focus on things and not people, but a leader is more people- and vision-focused. Let’s look at the new responsibilities people have when they move into leadership roles in their organizations.

• Solving problems
• Delegating tasks
• Offering your employees encouragement and praise
• More communication than you may have had to do in your previous role
• Motivating team members, and finally … demonstrating leadership

Thinking about these responsibilities, what do you consider to be the most important day-to-day part of your job? Is it oriented more toward things such as tasks ... people ... or leadership's visions for the future of the company?

If you’re new to management and leadership, you may still lean towards the task side of the job. For more experienced managers and leaders, your top responsibility is probably more vision-oriented. Over time, your responsibilities will likely change in your leadership role.

This graph visualizes how your skill sets need to change over time as you move higher up in leadership. Moving from left to right, you will likely lose some individual contributor task proficiency the higher in management you go. It becomes more about leveraging your expertise as a mentoring opportunity for others underneath you to become more task/technically proficient.

Next question … is it possible to be a good leader and an individual contributor/expert?

Possibly. The role of one can interfere with the other. There will always be a mix of leadership and task or technical expertise needed. But choosing to be the most task or technically proficient person on the team may limit your opportunity to be a strong leader.

So, how can a supervisor or manager maintain a high enough level of task or technical expertise and still grow as a leader?

For starters, you can get updates from other individual contributors or experts, keep up to date by reading about your industry, and attend professional association events and conferences throughout the year. A supervisor or manager needs to know the big picture, what’s new and what questions to ask. They don’t have to know all the technical details of the individual contributor.

What problems can occur because supervisors or managers don’t let go of the role of the individual contributor/expert?

Some of the problems are micromanagement, lack of development of team members, lack of team trust, long hours, burnout, and more. You can get into a pattern of always bailing the team out instead of developing them to handle the work. You are telling and not collaborating. Being a boss and not a leader.

Remember, a good leader delegates responsibility and authority (to a varying degree) and allows team members the opportunity to figure out their own way to achieve goals and objectives. They don’t feel the need to control everything.  

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