Early in my career, I got promoted to my first management role. I was proud of it — I’d been a strong individual contributor and someone had noticed.
A few weeks in, I gave one of my team members an assignment. A report I needed. I handed it off on Monday with a Friday deadline — and I felt good about it. Look at me, delegating like a real manager. Then I left her alone. If she had questions, she’d ask. That’s what I would have done.
She didn’t ask. Friday came. She turned in the report. I looked at the front page and felt pure panic: not the reflective kind, not the kind where you understand what went wrong. Just — what do I do with this?
It wasn’t what I needed. Not even close. My deadline was Monday, so I spent the weekend rewriting it myself. When I handed it in, it was my work with her name removed.
On Monday she asked how it went. I told her it was fine.
“Thanks for doing this for me,” I said. And that was it.
It took me months — and a deliberate effort to actually learn how to develop people — before I understood what I’d done. I’d given her an assignment without clearly communicating what I actually needed. I hadn’t checked in once. When she missed the mark, I took the work back rather than helping her get it right. And then I protected her from feedback that would have helped her grow.
I thought I was being kind. I was actually doing all three things that make the jump from individual contributor to manager so hard: I did the work myself, I focused on the work at the expense of the people doing it, and I left her with nothing to learn from.
I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately.
The Shift That Changes Everything
Last week, I had the privilege of presenting at the WV Career Collaborative and First2 Network Spring Co-Conference to a room full of people who care deeply about the workforce challenges facing this state and the teams they’re responsible for.
The session was called From ‘Me’ to ‘We’: Building a High-Performing, High-Retention Team. The core argument was simple, even if living it isn’t: the move from individual contributor to manager isn’t a promotion. It’s a different job. And the habits that made you good at the first job will actively work against you in the second one if you don’t examine them.
I named three specifically: doing the work yourself because it’s faster, over-managing the work without doing it, and focusing on the work at the expense of the people doing it because hard conversations are uncomfortable. None of these are character flaws. They’re earned habits. They just stop serving you — and start costing your team — the moment you’re responsible for someone else’s development.
What teams actually need, I told the room, isn’t a manager who does the work better than they do. It’s a manager who creates the conditions for the team to do its best work. That shift starts with trust — being consistent, honest, and clear. It deepens with psychological safety — the confidence that speaking up won’t cost you anything. And it becomes something sustainable when people feel like they genuinely belong: seen, included, and trusted by the person who sets the tone.
That’s not a nice-to-have. Gallup data puts managers at the source of at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement. One in two employees has left a job specifically to get away from their manager. The problem isn’t that managers don’t care. It’s that most of them were never developed to lead.
What the Room Already Knew
Here’s what I love about facilitating sessions: the best thinking in the room is never mine. So midway through, I posted five prompts around the room and handed everyone a pad of Post-it notes. No wrong answers. Just: what do you already know about this? One hundred fifty-one responses came back from people across sectors, industries, and levels of experience. It was honest in a way that pre-written survey data rarely is.
When asked what kills team trust fastest, the room named micromanagement five separate times before anything else appeared. Five times, unprompted. One participant captured the dynamic in a single line: “Blame rolling downhill. Leader is umbrella.” It’s a simple image for something managers don’t always claim as part of the job: when pressure, criticism, and frustration come in from the outside — from senior leadership, customers, boards — the leader’s job is to be the umbrella. You absorb what shouldn’t reach the team. What does reach them, you help them carry.
When asked about a manager who made them feel like they belonged, the answers weren’t about programs or perks. They were specific moments — the manager who remembered the names of their cats, the one who handed them real responsibility and said “I trust you, please proceed,” the one who told them: “We didn’t hire your resume. We hired you.” None of those moments required a budget line. They required a manager who was paying attention.
And when asked about small things that made a big difference, the list was almost entirely free: a check-in that wasn’t about deliverables, public recognition that named something specific, the simple act of working in the same physical space as the team. Small signals. Consistent practice. Over time, culture.
The energy in that room was something I don’t take for granted. People were open — about their frustrations, about what they’d seen go wrong, and about what they believed was possible. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it made for exactly the kind of session I’d hoped for.
I closed by giving the room three practices to take back to work:
- Go First — model what you want your team to feel safe doing before you ask them to do it.
- Ask Before Assuming — when someone brings you a problem, ask what they’ve already thought about before you offer anything.
- Name What You See — recognize not just what people do, but what they bring.
None of them are complicated. All of them require a decision about how you show up.
That’s what the session was about. And if the 151 notes on those gallery walk boards are any indication, the people in that room already understood it. They didn’t need me to tell them anything. They needed a facilitator and a room that turned what they already knew into something they could act on.
Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash