Strong relationships are essential for effective leadership, particularly during the transition from employee to leader. Building and maintaining trust with team members, peers, and former supervisors enhances communication, fosters collaboration, and supports better decision-making.
Key Insights
- Shifting from peer to leader involves changes in roles, power dynamics, and expectations, which require clear communication and mindful relationship management.
- Establishing strong relationships with team members supports engagement, collaboration, and effective conflict resolution.
- New leaders should initiate transparent conversations, adapt their leadership style to individual team member needs, and seek guidance from experienced mentors.
This lesson is a preview from our New/Current Leader Certificate Program Online. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Let's talk about the importance of relationships. And as you are going through this transition of being an employee to becoming a leader, developing, strengthening, and maintaining relationships is going to be really critical. It's going to help you foster collaboration and teamwork, which is, of course, going to help you make sure things actually get accomplished.
It's also going to contribute to higher levels of engagement by your employees. They're going to be more engaged in the work. It can also help promote open and effective communication.
The stronger the relationship I have with someone, the easier it will be for me to effectively communicate with them. And relationships also help us make better decisions and solve problems better because we have those relationships with people who are able to ask for their input and their perspective. As we transition from employee to leader, our relationships with our peers tend to change.
There's really no way that they can't change. The first thing that is a really big change is that the roles have changed. So someone who, before, was your peer, was your colleague, they are now subject to your management, your delegation, and to decisions that you make.
So that's a huge change in role. And there's also a change in power dynamics, because you are suddenly the person assigning the task, you very well may be tasked with evaluating their performance, and you are making decisions that are going to affect them. So the power dynamics are going to be very different.
This change in position can also create a change in expectations. So our expectations of our peers, when that someone is a peer versus when we're their leader, are very different. So we have to be transparent in our new position about new or differing expectations that we'll have with each other.
And that focus of being able to discuss that and be transparent about that is going to be through the use of open and effective communication. And there may also be a change in conflicts. So I may have been a peer with someone before, but when I am in a leadership position, I need to be sure that I'm approaching conflict resolution with an open mind and with a willingness, and I'm not thinking back to relationships that I had with someone when I was a peer.
I now need to approach conflicts with the clear eyes of a leader, so that I am approaching each conflict looking at both sides equally. So sometimes we have to establish relationships with new employees, and sometimes we have to re-establish relationships with people who have been our peers. So some of the things that we can do as a new leader are commit to communicating openly and transparently.
We can invest time in getting to know our team members as people, understanding their communication style, their work preferences. We can commit to collaborating and being very involved. Just because we've accepted a leadership position does not mean that we are not still going to collaborate and be involved in the work.
We also need to be prepared to set clear expectations that we need to address concerns promptly. As the leader, you are now responsible for making sure concerns get addressed, but you want to be sure, especially as you're establishing relationships, that you address those concerns promptly, and you want to begin adapting your leadership style to the needs of your employees. Not only do our relationships with peers change when we transition to leadership, but our relationships even change with our former supervisors.
So we need to initiate conversations to discuss the new role and the new relationship, and to really clarify expectations. We also need to remember to seek the guidance and expertise of people who have been in leadership positions longer than you. They can provide you with really great insight about their transition and what they would suggest for you as you begin your new leadership journey, and you want to make sure that you are making an effort to adapt to the new dynamics with people who were formerly your supervisors.
