Managing People Who Used to Be Your Peers

There's something slightly strange about becoming the manager of people you were having a moan about work with only a few weeks earlier.

One minute you're part of the team, sharing frustrations, having a laugh and getting on with the job. The next, you're the person responsible for making decisions, having difficult conversations and sometimes saying things people don't particularly want to hear.

And somehow, you're expected to navigate that change without everything feeling a little awkward.

I've found myself in this position more than once during my career. And although I knew I was capable of doing the job, that didn't necessarily make the shift in relationships any easier.

The second time it happened, I was fortunate enough to experience my first proper coaching session.

A friend offered to coach me. We sat down with a set of insight cards, had a good laugh along the way, and started exploring what I thought was my biggest challenge.

Time.

Or rather, the lack of it.

I was convinced that I simply didn't have enough hours in the day to do everything I needed to do. There were so many demands, so many expectations and so many people needing something from me.

It seemed pretty obvious what the problem was.

Except it wasn't.

As the conversation unfolded, I started to realise that the issue wasn't really time at all.

It was me.

Not in a particularly dramatic way! But I was holding on to expectations and relationships that had belonged to my previous role. I was reluctant to establish different boundaries, and I was making assumptions about how people might respond if I did.

In some ways, I was making the situation more difficult for myself.

What struck me was that my friend hadn't told me any of this. She hadn't given me a list of things to change or explained how I should manage my colleagues.

She'd simply asked questions that helped me look at the situation differently.

It was like someone holding up a mirror.

And, if I'm completely honest, I wasn't entirely expecting what I saw.

That conversation stayed with me.

It helped me recognise something that sounds incredibly obvious now: I couldn't control how other people responded to my new role. But I could change how I approached it.

I didn't need to become a completely different person or suddenly adopt some authoritative management persona. I could still be myself, still value those relationships and still enjoy working with the people around me.

But I also needed to accept that some things had changed.

Looking back, that experience taught me as much about myself as it did about leadership.

And it was probably one of the first times I really appreciated what coaching could offer.

Not someone telling me what I needed to do.

Someone helping me see what I hadn't quite been able to see for myself.