New managers face challenges that no one talks about

The transition to manager is one of the biggest shifts in your professional life. You go from being someone who does things to someone who enables other people to do things.

It’s rarely an easy transition. Making the leap to leadership forces you to rethink your identity. It changes the way you work, your routines, and your perspective. Like any major change, it can leave you feeling destabilized and uncertain for a long stretch of time.

Many people find this change difficult. Some of the challenges affect people in any sector who manage to step into a leadership role. Others are unique to nonprofit and social impact work.

If you’re going through this process, the most important thing to know is that you are not alone.

Lesser-known challenges for new leaders

Grief

As a new leader, you may feel a sense of loss because you are no longer spending most of your time doing the things you loved to do.

It’s normal to miss the feeling of satisfaction you had doing hands-on work, like interacting directly with members and clients, being an advocate, designing websites, or writing research papers. You may still do some of the work you loved in your new role, but you won’t focus on it like you did in the past.

You’ll find new routines that fulfill you, but it may take some time.

Lack of confidence

You will have less experience as a new leader than you had as a hands-on doer. You’ll be trying more things for the first time (often publicly), learning faster, and making mistakes more frequently.

If you feel less confident in your new role, that’s okay. Use this time to figure out the kind of leader you want to be and trust that confidence will return as the role becomes more familiar.

Loss of control

When you were only responsible for your own tasks, you had complete control over your own performance. Once you transition to manager, that’s no longer true.

Leaders achieve success through the teams they manage. Your work will be as good as your team’s work. Your ability to execute depends on their abilities. It may take a while to learn how to guide, shape, and influence instead of control.

Tongue-tied

As a doer, you were fine as long as you knew what needed to be done.

Being a manager is different. You need to explain things to other people in ways that they understand. You need to communicate a goal and be clear about specific requirements and expectations.

Communication skills are now very (very, very) important.

At sea under pressure

When the pressure is on, most of your old coping and success strategies won’t work anymore.

You can’t just work harder or work longer. You can’t block out the world until you resolve a problem. Managers need to keep other people in the loop. They need to get enough sleep to keep their judgement (and manners) intact. Managers also need to promote long-term solutions over quick fixes.

You’ll need to learn how to approach and solve problems differently in your new role.

Hyper-vigilance

When you’re a manager, you need to pay attention to so many different things. What gets done and how it gets done both matter. You’ll find yourself thinking about how you communicate with your team, how you manage performance, how you craft job descriptions, and how you handle illnesses, vacation, and personal matters.

Process things that seem like they should be simple will require more attention than you expect. It can be fun and stimulating, but at times it can also feel relentless. There are fewer opportunities to sit back and let someone else take care of the details while you rest. With experience, all of these details become familiar and require less energy.

Unique challenges of social impact leadership

The social impact world poses some unique challenges for those transitioning to manager.

First, you may be spending less time with the community that keeps you grounded. When you spend more time in internal meetings or engaging with donors, media, decision-makers, and advisors, you have less time for community. You’ll find it harder to notice changing trends and needs, harder to see if your efforts are having the impact you desire. You can easily become disconnected from the cause you serve, without even realizing it’s happening.

Second, you can’t just pick any old management style. Social impact leaders also need to spend extra time trying to develop skills that match their organization’s values. Traditional management and leadership training can help with the basics, but you can’t blindly copy practices that have “worked” for other organizations in the past.

Many old-school practices reinforce the inequities or power imbalances your organization set out to address. To lead an organization that reflects the values of your cause, you need to find new ways of doing things.

Facing the challenge is worth the effort

The leap is daunting. It can take years to feel a sense of confidence and familiarity in your new role, to forge a new sense of identity and build new routines. There are absolutely days when you’ll dream about stepping out of a leadership role, longing to feel responsible for your own performance and nothing else.

Stick with it. Leadership gets easier with experience. It’s not all challenges and learning curves.

The transition to managing means growing, testing the boundaries of your own capabilities and leadership, and discovering what you are capable of. That’s exciting.

Leading means you get to find ways to do what you know needs to be done, without waiting for someone else to see it first or giving you permission to act. That’s empowering.

Managing a team enables you to accomplish more than you could ever accomplish on your own, and do work you wouldn’t be able to do yourself through your own leadership. That’s inspiring.

Most importantly, stepping up to lead means you get to build different types of programs and organizations. You have a chance to do what hasn’t been done before, solve problems and address issues that have never been solved.

And that is how the world gets changed for the better.