Leading people you used to sit beside
They went quiet, and I read it as the relationship cooling. It was the org chart arriving. I was the last person on that team to notice my job had changed.
Part 4 of 5 in Becoming a Lead.
Two things were happening on my team that I did not know about.
Requests were arriving straight into the team from outside it, and nobody was pushing back on them. The team needed someone standing between them and that, and they did not have one, because the person whose job that now was did not know it was happening.
And work was running late without being reported as late. Not dishonestly. Just not surfaced, in the way that things are not surfaced when there is no comfortable moment to surface them in.
A month earlier I would have known both of these before lunch. I would have known because I was sitting there.
I read the signal wrong
What I noticed first was that people had become more guarded. Conversations were a little more careful. The easy openness of being on the same team doing the same job had gone somewhere, and I found it awkward, and I assumed it was something I had to work through on a personal level.
It was not personal at all. It was the organisation chart arriving, on time, and behaving exactly as it always does.
They had correctly understood that the relationship had changed. I had not. I was the last person on that team to update, which meant they adjusted their behaviour around a new situation while I kept operating inside the old one. They were not being disloyal by going quiet. They were being accurate.
Trying to keep it the same is not the kind thing
My instinct was to hold on to how it was. We had all been individual contributors on the same team, and I wanted that to still be true. Being “still one of us” felt like the decent version of the role. Anything else felt like putting on airs about a title.
It took me a while to see that this was not humility. It was declining to take the job.
A team with a lead who is still behaving like a peer does not have a peer. It has a gap where the lead should be. Nobody is deciding the things a lead decides, nobody is absorbing the pressure a lead absorbs, and the work of doing those things does not disappear. It gets distributed back across people who now have to do it on top of their own jobs, informally and without authority.
That is what those two failures actually were. Not a communication problem. A vacancy.
The space is the point
The thing I would tell myself is the thing that sounded worst to me at the time. It is fine, and it is necessary, to have space between a lead and the people they lead.
I mean space, not distance. Distance is coldness and it is a different mistake with its own costs. Space is simply occupying a different position with a different job, and letting that be visible rather than apologising for it.
Once I stopped resisting it, the reason for it became obvious. You cannot shield a team you are standing inside. Absorbing something on a team’s behalf, saying no to a request so they do not have to, taking the pressure of a date so it does not land on four people at once: all of that is done from a slightly different place. If you insist on being in the middle of the group, you are not in a position to stand in front of it.
The same is true of the harder things. Telling someone their work is not landing, deciding between two approaches when two capable people disagree, and one day telling someone this is not working out. None of those can be done by someone still busy proving they are the same as everyone else.
What actually closed the gap
Not a conversation about how things are different now. I have never seen that go well and I would not recommend trying.
What worked was rebuilding the channel I had lost, deliberately, in a form that fit the new shape. When I was sitting with them I got information for free, continuously, as a side effect of being there. That supply is gone the moment you are not there, and most new leads do not replace it. They just experience the silence and interpret it as a mood.
The one-on-one is where I put it back, once I stopped using that half hour to ask for status and started letting it be theirs. That is not a coincidence of sequencing. The venue exists because the informal channel closed, and it closed the day the role changed.
The other half was being visibly useful in the new position rather than the old one. Nothing repairs the awkwardness of a promotion faster than the team watching you take something off their plate that only you could have taken off it. They stop reading the change as a loss when they can see what it is for.
The part worth keeping
Everything in this series has the same shape underneath, and it started with not noticing the job had changed. This is the same failure, aimed at people instead of work.
Staying exactly who you were to your former peers looks like integrity. It reads, from where they are standing, as a lead who has not arrived yet. And they will not tell you that, because the guardedness you are trying to talk your way out of is the very thing stopping them.