The most consistent mistake I’ve watched new managers make is the one they don’t realise they’re making. They become a different person.
You can see it happen in real time. Two weeks into the new role they start using a different vocabulary. The sentences get longer. They start saying things like aligned, and cadence, and visibility into. They start booking 30-minute calls to do things that would previously have been a two-minute conversation by the kettle. They stop being themselves at work, because they have decided that the version of them which got promoted is somehow not quite enough for the next thing.
It is, by the way, almost always enough. The whole reason you got the job was the version of you that was there before.
The advice that has held up for 22 years
A man called John Webb gave me a line very early in my career that I have used as the spine of every team I’ve run since. Treat the cleaner and the CEO the same. The same warmth, the same attention, the same level of I see you, you matter, what do you need. Not the same content, obviously (you talk about different things to different people), but the same registration of them as a person. The same eye contact, the same effort.
People notice. They notice particularly because the world, especially professional services, is set up to do exactly the opposite. The default management mode in a lot of firms is be different upwards, be different downwards, and the result is a workforce who never knows quite where they stand with you. Treating everyone the same is a stabiliser. People can take a lot of bad news from a manager who is consistent. People cannot take any news at all from a manager who is two different humans depending on the room.
What does change
A couple of things, and they’re worth being honest about. You can no longer be the last one in the pub dancing on the table. You can still be at the pub. You can still buy the drinks. You can still tell the story that everyone is going to repeat for a fortnight. You just have to be the one who walks out at eight and lets the team have their night without you. That is a small price for keeping your authority intact on the Monday morning.
You also have to take the buck. Somebody on the team sent an email with a typo while you were on holiday. Somebody else didn’t do the thing you asked and it has now turned into a small mess. None of that matters. It is, by definition, your responsibility. I have absorbed the brunt of business frustration over absurdly trivial things many times because that is what the job is. If the cost of that is a tough conversation with an exec, that’s fine. It’s what the salary is for. The team you are protecting learns faster, the processes tighten, and trust compounds.
What surprised me about all of this, and would have saved me a lot of time if someone had told me earlier, is that having a real personal relationship with the team does not make hard conversations harder. The opposite. It makes them clearer. When you know what’s going on in someone’s life outside the office, the difficult conversation is less of a guessing game. You have a much better idea of why the conversation is happening, how the person is going to react, and what the right resolution looks like. The relationship is the context that lets the conversation be useful.
A working test for new managers
If you’ve just stepped into a management role and you want a quick read on whether you’ve started drifting into a different person, try this. Spend a week paying attention to two things: how you greet the most senior person you interact with, and how you greet the most junior. Same energy? Same eye contact? Same actual interest in their answer?
If the answer is yes, carry on. The job is hard enough without performing it.
