How to cope with promotion

Congratulations. You’ve worked hard and secured a coveted promotion, but the transition to your new role is likely to be quite disorienting.

“The e-mails change first. Then the expectations, and also, very quickly, the feeling that you’re no longer doing the work that made you successful in the first place ... You move from being the expert to enabling others,” says Anja van Beek, director of the WholeLeader Collective. She advises:

• Acknowledge that your role and identity have changed fundamentally and you will be doing different work;
• The skills that got you to this point will become less central and you will need to learn a new set of skills, including how to lead people;
• At first you may experience cognitive overload as you face more meetings and decisions and the margin for error seems to shrink;
• These are normal human responses and you will need to learn how to regulate your nervous system, and move from reacting to responding; and
• Growth is uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar and messy, but with time you will begin to feel like you belong in your new role.

Business Times