Article written by Nick Roud, Leadership Coach. October 2026, Auckland, New Zealand
Congratulations. You’ve been promoted. There was probably a slightly awkward email, a wet handshake from someone senior, maybe a card with a cartoon of a rocket on it or a view of someone random standing on top of a mountain in Queenstown, and a vague promise that you were ‘ready for the next step’.
Then, roughly 11 minutes later, you realised you were now responsible for other human beings. Not a spreadsheet. Not a project. Not your own neatly measurable output. For PEOPLE. People with moods, mortgages, bad Mondays, brilliant ideas, mysterious illnesses that only come on a Friday, strong opinions about the thermostat, and an unwavering ability to detect fear.
Well my friend on this wet Monday, a big welcome to management. It is the most important job most organizations treat as a reward for bring very good at something completely different. And if, your first few weeks, you have found yourself lying awake at 3am wondering whether you are secretly terrible at this, whether everyone hates you, and whether you should simply do everything yourself because at least then it would be done properly and up to your standards. Well my friend I have some news for you. You are NOT broken. You are a first time people manager.
The Great Promotion Trap
Here is how it usually happens across organizations around the world (and yes here in New Zealand). You were truly excellent at the actual work. You hit deadlines. You fixed problems. You knew where the special tea cup sat. You were the person who stayed late, answered the awkward questions, and quietly saved the day while everyone else was in a meeting about the meeting.
So someone sensible looked at you and thought. Let’s make them responsible for other people.
Which is a bit like promoting your best racing driver to design the car, manage the pit crew, negotiate the sponsorship deal, and explain to the waiting press why the engine is on fire. The skills that made you successful as an individual contirbutor, speed, control, expertise, personal high standards can become positively dangerous when you become a manager. Suddenly, doing everything yourself is not diligence. It is a bottleneck and you my friend are in the way. Correcting every small error is not high standards. It is what we call in the leadership coaching space “micromanagement”. Being available at all hours is not commitment. It is a slow motion collapse. New managers commonly struggle with exactly this transition: managing former peers, delegating, giving feedback, having difficult conversations, and resisting the urge to control every little part of the working day.
Deloitte 2025 global survey stated that 76% of newly appointed managers (i.e. people leaders) got zero to very little professional development about managing people. To me that is like asking Lewis Hamilton to drive his F1 car around a race track in France with a blindfold on. (But deep down I bet he would do a pretty good job at it!)
Research on leadership transition (from government here in New Zealand) identifies imposter feelings, identity shifts, decision fatigue, isolation, and burnout as recurring features of the move into management. https://www.mhwc.govt.nz In other words: the wobble is normal. The danger I see with emerging leaders and the one-to-one coaching work I do is pretending it isn’t. I can say hand on hear even the most seasoned experienced CEO I coach feels these things.
The Night You Tried to Do Everything
Let me describe a familiar scene that is shared with me in my practice. It is 6:47pm. Everyone else has gone home. You are still at your desk, surrounded by the wreckage of a day that began with good intentions (your to do list was neatly laid out) and ended with you personally reforming a presentation due to the ELT (executive leadership team) tomorrow. Why “because it would only take five minutes”. You have answered forty-one emails. You have attended six meetings. You have done your own work, hold of two other people’s work, and a small amount of work that nobody asked for. You have not had lunch. You have drunk coffee with the nervous energy of a man being chased by a wasp. And then someone say, “Are you okay?” And you say like every other single human, “Fine. Just getting on top of things”.
You are not fine. You are trying to be the entire team: the strategist, the speaker, the counsellor, the quality-control department, the motivational speaker, the calendar whisperer, and the human shield between your people and the organisation’s more eccentric decision.
This is what trying to do everything feels like and in a coaching session last week my client just burst into tears, I can’t keep going on like this!. It may feel noble for about a fortnight trying to do all but it can’t and shouldn’t; remain or become the norm. This is where one-to-one emerging leadership coaching plays a massive advantage and why we help many companies future leaders get on top of things early before then become a ‘bad-habit’.
To paint a clearer picture for you and these themes have been collected over the past ten years coaching CEOs, senior executives and emerging leaders.
- I feel exhausted
- I feel lonely
- I feel like I am failing
- I can’t do this job
New managers frequently share feeling isolated, overloaded, and anxious about accountability; these pressures can push people towards micromanagement and an unhealthy tension between supporting staff and managing performance. The tragedy is that the harder you try to be perfect, the less useful you actually become. Because management was never meant to be a one-person endurance event.
Let’s also pop another elephant into the room. Here it is take a good look!
You Are Not Their Friend. You Are Their Leader.
One of the first shocks of management is discovering that you cannot simply be “one of the gang” anymore. You may have been promoted from within. You may now be managing people who were yesterday colleagues. Perhaps they know about your disastrous team building experience. Perhaps they know you once cried at a client presentation. Perhaps they know exactly how you take your coffee and exactly which colleague irritated the hell out of you. Now you have to have a conversation about performance.
It is uncomfortable. Trust me when I say remaining true to yourself here is vitally important, pleas stop short of turning into your boss or worst still Adolf Hitler. Of course it is uncomfortable. You are asking someone to trust yo with their development, their reputation, their income, and occasionally their career. That is not a small thing (even though I have asked you to look at that gigantic elephant in the room). How you feeling right now about managing people! Go on ask yourself.
As a manager you cannot avoid the conversation. I know and have seen so called leaders get someone else to have a ‘quiet word’ and to me that is simply bullshit, if you are a leader, a manager get on and have the bloody conversation. And do not under any circumstances even if you have pit lane passes to that French Grand Prix pass the baton. Grab hold of it and get to work. The worst managers (I have not written that word for ten years), the worst managers are not usually cruel. They are avoidant experts. They see a problem, feel a flicker of discomfort, and decide they will “keep an eye on it”. They then keep one eye open whilst driving at 50000 miles an hour while the problem grows teeth, hires a lawyer, and starts influencing the team’s culture.
Let’s pause and flip that burger over shall we I don’t want to burn it.
Good management is not about being liked every single day. It is about being respected and trusted over time. That means clarity. It means honest feedback. It means saying, “This isn’t good enough, and here is how we are going to move forwards” without turning it into a science from the Godfather. It also means recognising that people are not resources. Sorry to say but they are not, they are not a number of the excel spreadsheet, not are they things you can treat like a bad dog owner. They are adults with inner lives, ambitions, worries, and a finite supply of patience. Treat them like capable human beings and most of them will surprise you.
The Delegation Problem
Ah delegation. The management equivalent of handing your car keys to a teenager. You know you should do it. you know that if yo do not, you will drown. But every instinct screams that if you let someone else do it, they will do it differently, and “differently” is code word for “wrongly”
So you delegate, well kind of. You give someone a task, then hover over them like a bee trying to drain the last sap of nectar from the flower. You check in “just to see how it’s going” every eleven minutes. You rewrite their draft. You take the task back at the first sign of difficulty. Then you complain that you have no time. The problem is not that your team cannot do the work. The problem my newly appointed manager is that you have not yet learned to tolerate the short-term discomfort of someone else learning.
Delegation is not about offloading rubbish. It is about growth. It requires you to be smart, clear and clear about the outcome, generous with context, honest about constraints, and brave enough to let someone do it 85% as well as you would, while they build the capability to do it better than you eventually. Let’s have a moment of honesty here shall we and I need a sip of my lemon water.
If you cannot delegate, you are not leading a team. you are operating a very expensive queue trying to get into Harrods on the Boxing Day Sales.
Feedback Is Not an Ambush
Many first-time managers fear feedback because they imagine it must be dramatic. There must be a serious face. A closed door. A folder. Perhaps a box of tissues. You may think this doesn’t happen, well it does.
Usually, it should be none of those things.
Feedback works best when it is timely, specific, and humane. Not: “Your attitude has been a concern.” That is vague, threatening, and about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Better: “In yesterday’s meeting, you interrupted Maria twice. I know you were excited, but it shut down the discussion. Next time, let her finish, then build on the point.”
That is not cruelty. That is respect. You are telling someone the truth because you believe they can improve.
The same applies to praise. “Great job” is pleasant but useless. “You handled that difficult client brilliantly you stayed calm, asked the right questions, and gave us a clear next step” teaches someone what to repeat.
New managers often identify feedback, accountability, and difficult conversations as their biggest weaknesses, precisely because nobody taught them how to do these things well. Yet these are the very skills that separate a manager who merely occupies a title from one who builds a team. When was the last time a police officer pulled you over to say hey the way you took that corner was brilliant! As a manager you have got to get used to giving feedback.
The Loneliness of the Open-Plan Office
Here is the part nobody puts in the induction pack: management can be lonely. We all hear and I have coached CEO for over ten years that it is lonely at the top. Well that also is true in newly appointed managers, go back and read that stat I shared from Deloitte again!
You are no longer simply one of the team. You cannot vent freely in quite the same way. You know things you cannot always share. You carry pressures you cannot always explain. You must be steady when you feel anything but. That isolation is not a personal failing. It is structural. Studies of new leaders describe a loss of peer relationships, a shift in identity, and the peculiar experience of being “no longer one of them, but not yet fully one of the leadership group.”
So what do you do?
You find support. Not gossip. Not a colleague who will happily pour petrol on every workplace fire. Real support: a mentor, a trusted peer, a senior leader who remembers what it was like, or a coach who can help you think clearly without judging you.
Leadership coaching is precisely that and here at Nick Roud Coaching it is: a structured, confidential relationship that helps leaders adapt to new roles, build self-awareness, clarify priorities, and develop the skills to lead others. For emerging leaders especially, coaching provides individualised challenge and support at the exact moment when the old rules have stopped working.
You do not need to be “broken” to benefit from coaching. You need to be human, ambitious, and honest enough to admit that leadership is harder than it looked from the outside.
Stop Trying to Be Superhuman
There is a particular kind of new-manager heroism that deserves to be retired immediately. It goes like this: arrive early, leave late, answer every message, attend every meeting, absorb every problem, take on every task, apologise for existing, and then wonder why you feel like a damp towel found under your bed after a long cold winter
This is not leadership. It is martyrdom with a laptop.
Your job is not to do everything. Your job is to create the conditions in which good work can happen repeatedly, sustainably, and without requiring you to sacrifice your health, relationships, and ability to enjoy a weekend. That means boundaries. It means prioritising. It means asking for help. It means accepting that some things will be imperfect. It means trusting your team. It means going home sometimes.
Managers who receive training in coaching and people development see materially higher team engagement and stronger performance outcomes. Coaching also helps leaders develop communication, delegation, resilience, and self-awareness the exact capabilities that prevent the “do everything myself” spiral. (thank you Gallup for those insights)
In short: investing in yourself is not self-indulgence. It is operational strategy. Over the past two years we have offered an Emerging Leadership Scholarship. People say I am made to do this but I believe learning should be split between the provider and the company, I like to call this the win-win-win effect. Have you heard about it? Many organisations here in New Zealand are on board in 2027 our Emerging Leaders Coaching Intake will be our 9th. Check out 2027 intake dates and more here
What Good Looks Like
Good first-time management is rarely cinematic. It looks like this:
- You are clear about what success means.
- You give people context, not just tasks.
- You ask questions before issuing instructions.
- You give feedback early, privately, and specifically.
- You recognise good work properly.
- You make decisions, even imperfect ones, rather than letting them fester.
- You protect your team from unnecessary chaos.
- You admit when you do not know.
- You go home.
- You sleep.
None of this requires you to become a different person. It requires you to become a more deliberate version of yourself.
And no, you will not get it right immediately. You will have conversations you replay at midnight. You will delegate badly. You will occasionally solve a problem that someone else should have solved. You will send an email at 10:58 p.m. and immediately regret it.
That is fine. Leadership is not a performance. It is a practice.
The Six Months That Change Everything
This is where I shall be direct, because you deserve directness.
If you are a new or emerging leader and you are quietly struggling if you are trying to do everything, terrified of getting it wrong, unsure how to manage former peers, and beginning to suspect that “manager” is a title someone gave you without an instruction manual do not try to work it out alone.
My Emerging Leader Coaching Scholarship Program exists for exactly this moment.
It is one-to-one coaching over six months. Not a generic webinar. Not a PDF you will open once and abandon. Not a motivational poster with a mountain on it. Not a week long residential that is just that a week.
Six months of proper, personal coaching: a confidential space to talk through the real situations you face, build confidence, learn to delegate, handle difficult conversations, set boundaries, develop your people, and stop mistaking exhaustion for effectiveness.
Why six months? Because leadership is not fixed in a two-hour workshop. It changes through repetition, reflection, feedback, and practice. Coaching helps leaders build self-awareness, clarify direction, strengthen relationships, and take greater ownership of their actions and results. It also gives new managers something they rarely get: a thinking partner (no not a AI agent that looks shiny on the outside yet leaves you even more confused and puzzled) who is not their boss, not their team, and not emotionally invested in the office politics.
The Emerging Leader Coaching Scholarship Program is for the person who has just been promoted and feels excited one day and terrified the next. It is for the capable professional who is excellent at the work but unsure how to lead the people doing it. It is for the leader who wants to do this properly without burning out, becoming a tyrant, or disappearing into other people’s problems.
You do not have to earn support by suffering first.
The Honest Ending
Managing people for the first time is one of the strangest, most demanding, most rewarding things you will ever do.
One day, someone on your team will handle a difficult situation well because you gave them the confidence, clarity, or opportunity to do so. They may not even realise you helped. You will notice. And it will feel better than any individual achievement you ever produced alone.
That is the point.
You are no longer paid simply to be good at the job. You are paid to bring out the best in others. That requires courage, patience, humility, and a willingness to keep learning. So stop trying to do everything. Start becoming the leader your team actually needs.
And if you want a structured, supportive, six-month partnership to help you make that transition properly, apply for the Emerging Leader Coaching Scholarship Program: 1:1 coaching over six months.
Because the best managers are not the ones who never struggle.
They are the ones who learn how to lead through it.
Nick, Auckland October 12th 2026
Nick Roud is an executive leadership coach based in Auckland, New Zealand. His work currently takes him to nine countries where he coaches Chief Executives, senior executives and emerging leaders. Established in 2016 Nick flies under the radar, works one-to-one with some amazing companies that invest in their biggest assets, their people. Find out more about Nick’s world here
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