Mastering the Transition from Emerging Leader to First-Time Leader

Compared to all future transitions in your leadership journey and career, the transition from Emerging Leader to First-Time Leader is unique in several ways. This transition represents an opportunity for emerging leaders and high-potential leaders to transform themselves both personally and professional.

Video Summary:

• Experienced leaders have had opportunities to learn from experience, which is the best “teacher of leadership.”
• Emerging leaders simply don’t have the lessons of experience.
• Emerging leaders ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ about themselves as leaders, about the actual work of managing and leading people, or the Leader Impact that their authentic leadership style will have on others … much less, what their authentic leadership style is!
• Emerging leaders thus typically don’t have the self-perspective, tools, knowledge, or direction to prepare for the realities of leading and managing and the personal and professional transformation that a successful transition from emerging leader to first-time leader offers-and in many ways demands.
• This transition can be uniquely transformational because, done well, it challenges the very core of how a person understands themselves as a person and ‘worker.’
• Our language demonstrates how closely we identify with our work. Most of us say things like: I am a teacher. I am an engineer, I am an accountant, etc.
  • Rather than the more distant: I do teaching work, I do engineering work, etc.
• The true transformation is from ‘one who does the work’ to ‘one who works the people and team.’ I am a manager and leader of people. This transformation is no small task.
• It’s easy to transition from worker to manager/leader by doing it wrong.
• To succeed as a leader, it takes intellectual and often deep emotional work.
• There are steps that can be taken before starting a leadership role.
• The video shares 7 important transitions first-time leaders face.
• Subsequent videos in this series address each of the 7 challenges along with ideas for emerging leader development.