What to do after you got promoted

You’ve just been promoted. You update LinkedIn. You answer congratulatory emails. Your calendar fills with new meetings. You feel... thrilled, maybe a little anxious. But beneath the surface, something deeper shifts—and it often goes unacknowledged: your entire mode of value creation has just changed.

Sabina Nawaz, executive coach and author of You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be, challenges the dominant narrative that promotions are personal validations. Instead, she argues they are institutional inflection points. Your performance is no longer measured by how well you deliver, but by how well you multiply.

This reframing has consequences—especially in environments where over-functioning, not delegation, is seen as loyalty. For strategy leaders and HR heads tasked with grooming future-ready managers, Nawaz’s core message lands with strategic clarity: the first mistake most newly promoted managers make is trying to prove they deserved it.

Many newly promoted managers confuse responsibility with continued delivery. They become overloaded players trying to double as coaches—doing their old job at night and their new one by day. Nawaz calls this the “validation trap.” It’s not just exhausting. It’s strategically incoherent.

In practical terms, this means a new manager might continue writing code, closing sales, or firefighting issues that a team member could handle—while delaying critical tasks like defining team direction, shaping culture, or resolving ambiguity. The result? Neither job gets done well. And the team remains dependent, confused, or demotivated.

For firms operating in hierarchical or founder-led environments (like those across MENA, South Asia, or family enterprises in the UK), this pattern is often exacerbated. Promotions happen without systems adaptation. Expectations shift, but enablement doesn’t. Leaders are told to "step up" without clarity on what stepping up actually looks like.

Nawaz’s approach begins with subtraction. She asks newly promoted managers to make a list—not of what they’ll do—but of what they’ll stop doing. What tasks will be handed off? What decisions will now be delegated? What relationships need to be redefined? This is less about ego than architecture. Multipliers don’t just do more. They create frameworks others can execute within. That’s the job.

The moment you're promoted, everyone else’s perception of you changes—even if your behavior doesn’t. Former peers may become direct reports. Former managers now expect autonomy. Your mood signals more than your performance. Your words become interpreted as direction, even when unintentional.

This ambiguity often causes paralysis or overcompensation.

Some managers adopt a new tone—suddenly more formal, less collaborative. Others stay “the same,” hoping to preserve camaraderie, and inadvertently undermine their authority. Nawaz’s advice? Conduct a deliberate relationship reset.

She recommends one-on-one conversations with former peers to clarify boundaries: “Here’s what’s changing. Here’s what’s not. Here’s where I’ll need your ownership. Here’s how I’ll support you.” The goal isn’t to assert dominance. It’s to establish consistency.

Especially in flatter orgs or multicultural teams, this reset is vital. In Western firms, the risk lies in overly informal transitions that delay power shifts. In Gulf and Southeast Asian firms, the risk is rigidity that blocks rapport. The common denominator is unspoken assumptions. Nawaz argues that clarity—not charisma—is the true stabiliser.

In emerging or fast-growth markets, such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or Vietnam, promotions often happen fast. The pipeline of middle managers is thin. Leadership development is sporadic. Titles outpace training.

Here, Nawaz’s frameworks function less like fine-tuning and more like life rafts. The “stop doing” list becomes a survival mechanism. The relationship reset prevents political friction. The mindset shift from performer to multiplier protects long-term credibility.

In contrast, UK-based firms—particularly in professional services or financial sectors—often face the opposite problem: slow promotions with high scrutiny. Here, new managers may hesitate to lead, over-relying on consensus or upper management direction. Nawaz’s advice becomes a call to action: define your leadership lane early, before it’s defined for you.

In both contexts, her insistence on intentional first steps serves as a leadership onboarding checklist. Not performance theatre. Strategic architecture.

The longer a manager continues to “do,” the less their team learns to deliver. The longer decisions bottleneck at the top, the less autonomy flows downward. Nawaz uses a simple phrase: “If you’re the one always solving the problems, you’ve made yourself the system.”

This isn’t martyrdom. It’s misdesign.

Many firms reward high-output individual contributors with promotion but fail to acknowledge that leadership is not additive. It’s distributive. The best managers reduce friction, not just take on more. They build structures, rituals, and cadences that allow performance to repeat—without their daily involvement.

When Nawaz coaches leaders, she introduces a calendar audit: look at your week. How many meetings are decision-making vs. status reporting? How many hours are spent building team clarity vs. executing solo? What percentage of your time unlocks others’ work? These questions are not performance reviews. They’re capital allocation reviews—of time, trust, and talent.

Nawaz pushes against the idea that new managers should start with grand visions or lofty values. Instead, she focuses on three operating principles:

1. Model what you want to scale.
2. Say less—but make it count.
3. Choose consistency over intensity.

In newly promoted roles, employees watch for signals. Are decisions consistent? Are trade-offs acknowledged? Is accountability clear? Culture, in Nawaz’s framing, is less about words and more about repeated behavior.

This is especially useful in hybrid teams or cross-border reporting lines. The illusion of alignment often hides divergence. In these contexts, a well-facilitated weekly check-in with the same agenda, the same decision rules, and the same reflection rhythm builds more trust than a town hall or slide deck ever could. Managers don’t need to perform leadership. They need to design it—through repeatable rituals.

Perhaps the hardest shift for new managers is psychological. You were once a peer. Now you're the escalation point. That shift comes with trade-offs.

Nawaz cautions against trying to retain “likeability” at the expense of clarity. Trying to be everyone's friend risks inconsistency. Avoiding conflict often leads to silent resentment or performance drift. “Clarity is kindness” may sound like a slogan. But for newly promoted managers, it’s a leadership posture.

The point isn’t to become cold. It’s to become fair. Emotional intelligence in leadership isn’t about defusing every conflict. It’s about staying calm in ambiguity, surfacing what’s unsaid, and enabling others to decide—not just follow.

This principle cuts across geographies. Whether in a London fintech, a Dubai sovereign entity, or a Malaysian logistics firm, the best managers aren’t just smart. They’re stable. And predictability—especially in environments with shifting macro or political headwinds—is the new strategic edge.

The most actionable piece of Nawaz’s framework may be her take on the first 100 days. While conventional wisdom focuses on visibility and quick wins, Nawaz urges new managers to focus on positioning—not for optics, but for long-term leverage.

She asks:

• What are the key tensions you will own—and resolve?
• What decision rights need clarification?
• What success will look like in 6 months—and for whom?
• What will the team say has improved—because of you?

These questions surface a deeper truth: a promotion is not a reward. It’s a recalibration of power, structure, and trust.

In high-growth companies, where titles can outpace maturity, the absence of this reflection often leads to one of two outcomes: managers who overreach and burn out—or managers who underreach and get sidelined. Nawaz offers a third path: design your role before others define it for you.

Sabina Nawaz doesn’t glamorise promotion. She doesn’t offer productivity hacks. What she provides is something more enduring: a redefinition of leadership as a designed system, not an individual performance.

For founders scaling new leads, for HR shaping manager pathways, and for newly promoted professionals who feel like they’re sprinting through fog—her work is a necessary recalibration.

Because the truth is this: Your promotion wasn’t about you. It was about the system needing something more. And the best managers don’t fill that gap by doing more. They fill it by making more possible—for others.