Avoid Regret: Empower Promoted Leaders with a Compass to Success

This was first published on LinkedIn on the 1st May 2026.

Nearly half of promoted leaders are still viewed as “not performing” after 18 months in role. Realistically, organisations need all their promoted leaders to hit the required performance levels within 12 months, but ideally 6.

Here’s how newly promoted leaders struggle:

• Moving from being a technical manager with actual ‘hands-on’ experience to creating direction, expectations and keeping a team accountable. They stay in the detail, micromanage and the team feel lost and unclear on what’s required of them.

• They need to set performance requirements for their previous peers. They avoid resetting the relationship, being clear on expectations or holding them to account, this can quickly lead to conflict.

• Senior stakeholders can be scary, especially when the previous manager blocked access or over-protected the team from these stakeholder interactions. They struggle to understand the reality of organisational politics and build effective and influencing relationships which impacts credibility and advocacy for the leader or their work. This puts them on the back foot and damages confidence.

• Getting confident with new communication and relationship requirements of this senior level. They are now leading managers, who will have varying performance and capability levels, they will need to be communicating a bigger picture and relating this to deliverables so that those managers can influence performance.

Moving to a strategic leadership role, for the first time, is an incredibly different job and when they struggle they’ll be over thinking, wasting time and energy, and hitting overwhelm quickly, all of which has a negative impact on well-being for them and their team. Organisations with leaders who are struggling see team attrition and disengagement increase by 20%.

If you are looking for an intentional approach to support your newly promoted strategic leaders to successfully navigate their new role, I can help you take action, book a call here.

Why do promoted leaders struggle?

”Congratulations, you’ve got the job!!”

Then, they are left to figure out the transition themselves. I’ve experienced it myself, as a team member and when I was promoted into a strategic leadership role. Those experiences have helped me to recognise the challenges and the steps required for successful transitions to leadership roles.

The reason they struggle is they need a clear map and personalised compass to the desired destination of being a strategic leader who is clear, capable and confident, quickly.

They have to figure out for themselves what being a strategic leader means and they don’t know how to get there. However, if your promoted leaders are given a compass to navigate their new role, they will quickly move from the operational manager they were to the strategic leader your organisation needs them to be.

I can help you co-create these promotion transition success maps and compass so your promoted strategic leaders can successfully navigate their new role. To get started, book a call here.

Here’s the difference it makes to have a clear map and compass for a new strategic leadership role.

Providing a clear map for the destination helps them be clear on what is needed from them as a strategic leader.

This avoids them:

• Getting stuck in their previous role and clinging onto what they know best.

• Being unclear on what leadership really means in your organisation.

• Not recognising the shift they need to make to be successful, quickly.

• Not focusing on what matters most, such as relationship building and understanding how their new team impacts organisational success.

• Losing credibility before they’ve even got going.

• Becoming a leader who is viewed as failing (which is almost half of them).

Providing clarity doesn’t mean spoon feeding them. For the best results, the map is co-created with the leader so they quickly understand the requirements and get clear on what they will need to do differently to succeed.

From there, with the organisation's support, they will be responsible for figuring out the right way-points for them and their team, but they will be clear on the direction they need to be heading to succeed in their new role.

This is where their new compass comes in!

The compass is about being clear on where the gaps are and closing them, so they can be capable and confident in their new role. This is about helping them transition and build the skills, behaviours and mindset required to succeed in this new and more challenging role.

When strategic leaders don’t have the skills, behaviours and mindset required, this creates:

• A lack of focus for performance, because they don’t know how to translate vision into goals for the team.

• Poor feedback delivery and they are unable to receive it with the openness required for growth because they don’t know the most effective way to do it.

• Low levels of psychological safety, because they can’t handle the truth or don't know how to create a safe space for this across the team.

• A lack of recognition and general discontentment because they haven’t been leading a whole team performance cycle and they rely too heavily on their top performers.

• Frustration from the Executive Team who believed they would see results from the promotion but performance is below expectations.

If they don’t have a clear map or compass; they risk being a promoted leader who struggles and negatively impacts the performance and well-being of their team.

To provide a clear map with a compass that helps your promoted leaders successfully navigate their new strategic role, I can help you figure that out. To get started, book a call here.

Let me know if you have any questions or have any thoughts about this topic by emailing me at anwen@purpleskyconsulting.co.uk.

All the best

Anwen

p.s. I recently joined the HR, Unfiltered podcast as a guest, talking about this critical topic of helping promoted leaders to successfully navigate their new roles.

You can listen here and read the write up by Dean C, host of the HR, Unfiltered Podcast (who I credit for the map and compass analogy!).

If you want to discuss this topic some more, reply to this message directly or book a call here.