Emerging leaders are encouraged to reflect on their current professional networks and consider how key relationships may evolve as they step into greater responsibility. Recognizing both formal and informal connections—across all levels of the organization—helps future leaders prepare for new opportunities and navigate the challenges that accompany career advancement.
Key Insights
- Strong professional networks span superiors, peers, and junior colleagues, especially those showing potential and actively developing their own connections.
- Transitioning into a leadership role often reshapes relationships with colleagues, managers, and direct reports as expectations and influence shift.
- Understanding how authority affects perception can help new leaders anticipate opportunities and manage challenges with greater clarity.
This lesson is a preview from our Leading Through Relationship-Building Course Online & Emerging Leader Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Welcome back. The goal of the exercise that you just did is for you to really spend some time thinking about who you are connected to within the organization. Something I didn't mention, but maybe you realized as you were filling out your circles, is that it may be a peer.
It may also be someone who you're leading in a project, and they may not be equal to you, but you realize that they have very, very strong potential, and they also are working on a network. So again, it's not limited to just people who have more, let's say, responsibility and authority than you do, but these could be your peers and also people who don't have as much experience as you, but are working towards really building a strong career for themselves. So anytime that you think that, ah, I forgot to put one in, please go back and add that person or that department into your network circle.
Now, let's also consider what happens as you change your roles as you're moving on, and so we are also going to take a look at that in exercise one two. We're going to talk about changing relationships. So the question now becomes for you, you already have one network, but also consider, as you move into formal leadership, which hopefully is in your future as an emerging leader, I think it's important for us to anticipate how relationships will change as we move into different levels of responsibility and authority and begin to acquire a title.
So let's pretend for a moment that you're not yet a team leader, but you see it coming soon, and as you move into a team leader position, you now have a title: team leader. I think it's always helpful to anticipate how relationships might change as you move into that. So, as you acquire a title, how does your relationship with management change? How are you seen differently? How do you see the same? How do your colleagues see you now that you are colleagues with a different group of people? What about your former co-workers, new followers who have now come under your formal leadership? As you take a look at that, I can predict that you're going to see some really excellent things that come out of these new relationships, and you might also identify some, yeah, yeah, there might be some challenges in this as well, and that's why we don't want to start with question number one.
We also want you to go to question number two. So what opportunities does this provide for you, and then ultimately, what are some potential challenges that you might have to work around? I'll give you some time to work on that, and then we'll come back.
