03/06/2026
The day I became a manager, someone put a card on my desk with "Congratulations!" written in it. There was a balloon. An actual balloon. I felt like I'd won the Ryder Cup.
Reader, I had not won the Ryder Cup.
Within about a fortnight I had successfully: given feedback so carefully worded it was essentially a riddle, nodded through an entire finance meeting while writing "REVIEW FIGURES" on my notepad as if I was definitely going to review some figures, and spent forty five minutes after a team meeting trying to decode whether "fine" meant fine or meant the specific kind of fine that means everything is absolutely 'not fine'.
It meant the second one. It is always the second one!
The balloon had long since deflated. I related to it on a personal level.
Here is what nobody tells you before you walk into your first team meeting radiating borrowed confidence. Being brilliant at your job and being good at leading people are two completely different skills, and getting promoted is not the moment you acquire the second one. It is just the moment everyone starts assuming you have, and begins watching you quite carefully to check.
You find this out yourself. Usually on a Tuesday. Always before 10am.
The difficult conversations, the politics, the performance reviews, all of it is learnable and manageable once you know what you're doing. But none of that is what gets people first. What gets people first is the strange, slightly wobbly feeling of not quite belonging with your old peers anymore, and not yet knowing how to be what your team needs, and not being able to admit any of that out loud because you have a title now and a balloon and presumably some sort of plan.
I did not have a plan. I had excellent posture and a very convincing nod and I was absolutely winging it.
I suspect I am not alone in this.
