Leading a team outside your expertise backfires when you over-apologize for what you do not know and forget to lead with what you do bring. Lia’s move is to name the limitation once, then immediately lay out a concrete commitment to each team member so they see your value from day one. This episode is especially useful for new leaders stepping into cross-functional roles or anyone promoted to manage a discipline they have never practiced.
This episode is part of the New Manager Essentials & First-Time Leaders series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“Being a manager is not the same job as doing your old job, just having people reporting to you.”
“…the biggest downfall was that I didn’t think about what it meant to be a manager. I didn’t think about how I wanted to show up as a manager.”
“…we can’t be predictable when we don’t know what we’re trying to do predictably, when we don’t know how we’re showing up.”
“…when people feel invested in, they invest back. That’s what this is all about.”
Episode highlights
The biggest lie new managers believe
The job did not just get a few more meetings stapled on. Lia opens with the core misconception that derails most new managers: the belief that leading a team is basically the same as the individual contributor role, just with direct reports. That belief has real consequences. It stops new managers from seeking support, stops companies from investing in manager development, and leaves teams with a leader who is winging it.
The story that proves the point
Lia’s first management experience was not a clean start. She was promoted to manage a peer who had been told by their shared manager that he would get the role first. Day one as a manager meant hearing: “You stole my job and I’m going to make it a living hell for you.” Her instinct was to smooth it over and keep doing the job the same way. That was the real downfall. Not the difficult situation, but the absence of any intentional thinking about what being a manager actually meant.
Setting your leadership intention
The first exercise in The New Manager Playbook is defining your leadership intention: the specific qualities you want to embody as a leader. Transparent. Compassionate. Direct. Whatever fits you. This is not a vision board exercise. It is a practical anchor you return to when things get hard. Without it, you only know what you do not want to do (micromanage, yell, avoid) and have no map for what you will do instead.
Transparency does not mean sharing everything
One of the sharpest examples Lia gives: what does a transparent leader do when layoffs are coming and they cannot say anything? The wrong move is canceling all one-on-ones and going quiet. The right move is leaning into the intention. Something like: “There is a lot going on right now. Some of it I cannot talk about yet, but I will share what I can as soon as I am able. In the meantime, let’s focus on setting you up for success.” That is transparency without breaking confidentiality. The intention gives you the script.
Predictability is the foundation of trust
Being liked is not what builds trust on a team. Predictability is. When you show up consistently in line with your stated intention, follow through on what you say, and behave the same way whether things are easy or hard, that is when your team starts to trust you. You cannot be predictable if you have never decided how you are going to show up.
Own the job, own the title
A lot of new managers walk in hoping people will like them, worrying about imposter feelings, and shrinking in situations where someone on the team has more experience or wanted the role themselves. Lia’s call to action is direct: show up with confidence and humility at the same time. Know what you stand for. Be clear on how you handle conflict, how you give feedback, what the vision is. That clarity is not arrogance. It is what the team needs from you. The player-coach model (do your old job plus manage people) is really just two jobs for the price of one, and it sets you up to fail by keeping you stuck in the old identity instead of stepping fully into the new one.
The actual ask
Put down the assumption that nothing has changed. Take a real step back and treat this as a new job, because it is. Define your intention. Anchor to it. Show up predictably. When your team feels invested in, they invest back, and that is when the job starts to get easier for everyone.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 199: Why no one likes being a manager (and what to actually do about it). Most managers dislike their role not because they lack care, but because 60 to 70 percent of them were handed the job with zero training and forced to learn in front of their teams. Lia breaks down the three real reasons managing feels so hard right now and argues that waiting for your company to fix it is not a strategy. This episode is for anyone currently managing, responsible for managers, or wondering whether they even want the role.
- Ep 179: How to overcome imposter syndrome as a new leader (and get your team’s buy-in fast). Imposter syndrome does not go away, but the best leaders stop letting it run the show. Lia shares a three-step framework, setting your leadership intention, owning the reasons you were chosen, and re-enlisting each team member around their goals, that can turn a skeptical team into bought-in collaborators in as few as three conversations. This episode is especially useful for first-time managers, newly promoted leaders, and anyone stepping into a peer-to-manager transition.
- Ep 175: How to manage former peers and friends after a promotion. Managing a former peer or friend is one of the hardest leadership transitions, not because you know them too well, but because that familiarity tempts you to downplay your new role and skip the reset conversation. Lia’s three-step framework: name the change explicitly, set clear expectations tied to that person’s goals, and own your authority without apology. This episode is essential for anyone newly promoted onto a team they were already part of.
- Ep 162: How to lead a team outside your area of expertise without losing their respect. Leading a team outside your expertise backfires when you over-apologize for what you do not know and forget to lead with what you do bring. Lia’s move is to name the limitation once, then immediately lay out a concrete commitment to each team member so they see your value from day one. This episode is especially useful for new leaders stepping into cross-functional roles or anyone promoted to manage a discipline they have never practiced.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
The biggest lie about becoming a new manager is that it’s the same job. Being a manager is not the same job as doing your old job, just having people reporting to you. And I think because of that misunderstanding, so many of us really struggle at first. So many of us think, oh, everything’s the same. Now I just have to have a few more meetings and a few more one-on-ones and, and nothing really changes. But that belief prevents us from getting the support that we need, and it actually prevents our companies from giving us tools to be better managers.
Then we’re struggling. We’re not connecting with our teams, we’re we. We know a lot like what we don’t wanna do, how we don’t wanna show up, we don’t wanna micromanage, we don’t wanna like be mean to people. We don’t wanna yell at people, whatever. But we don’t think at all about how to be a leader. This mistake is gonna get on our way every single time. And today I wanna talk about how to avoid that so that we show up the best we can as a leader.
All right, let’s do this. I’m Leah Garvin and this is the New Manager Playbook. So when I first managed a team, okay, I remember it well. So I was, I was on a team with another person. It was, he and I were managed by one person and we were friends, we were peers. We got along pretty well. Um. He was a little bit rougher around the edges. I’ll, I’ll give you that, but it wasn’t my problem because we were peers.
And then I was asked by our mutual manager to become the manager of the team. And I was really, really excited about this because I had wanted to be a manager. I was in the corporate world and, and you know, a lot of us in the corporate world, that’s kind of the only path to advancing is being a manager. We don’t really, you know, if you don’t have a bunch of people under you, it’s hard to get promoted.
It’s hard to say. You’re really operating as a leader. So I was all in, I was all about it. And so this manager asked me to be the manager of the other guy. Now, unbeknownst to me, he also asked the other guy to be the manager, or he had said that he would be the manager before I joined the team. So I am, I, I’m told I’m to be the manager and this guy looks at me like, uh, thanks for stealing my job.
So you can only imagine how awful that was coming outta the gate. That I, and I’m like, well, I don’t know. It’s not my fault, but he thinks that it’s my fault he thinks I stole his job. And this is literally the first interaction we have with me as a manager is him saying, you stole my job and I’m gonna make it a living hell for you. You can only imagine how that goes. Now I am here stuck believing that, well, okay, it’s the same job.
If I just do the regular stuff I was doing before and now have some one-on-ones with this guy, we’re gonna be okay. And that was really the downfall because I tried to smooth it over and you know, just start saying, well like, Hey, what are you working on? Only to find that he hadn’t been doing all of his work. So it was like a whole other problem and I really, really struggled with it. And I thought to myself, well, I just gotta get through this situation because this is the last time I’m gonna be managing anyone.
It’s fine. I’ll just never do this again. And, and, you know, muscle through it. That’s not how anybody wants to have their leader show up, muscling through it, figuring out as they go and thinking that it’s not really a different job. Frankly, that was the biggest downfall. Not even that I wasn’t set up for success because this manager telling both of us the same thing. The biggest downfall was that I didn’t think about what it meant to be a manager.
I didn’t think about how I wanted to show up as a manager, and this is why I start the new manager playbook out with setting our intention as a leader. Thinking about how we wanna show up as a leader, what qualities do we want to embody? Do we wanna be transparent and compassionate, direct and you know, whatever. Like, what are these qualities that we wanna embody? Because this gives us an anchor, something to come back to when things get hard.
Because if we’re thinking to ourselves, well I know I don’t wanna micromanage and I know I don’t wanna, whatever, like I was already saying. What do we wanna do? How did I wanna show up for the sky? I didn’t have any idea. I thought it was the same job. So first and foremost, we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta realize, hey, our job has changed, and our whole mindset around it has to change. A lot of us are asked to be managers and, and we have to still do a lot of the existing work we were doing before.
This is very common in the corporate world. Sometimes it’s called a player coach model, but it’s really just a two jobs for the price of one model, quite frankly. You know, we’ll talk about the issues I have with that later. So you’re a manager and you’re still doing some of your individual contributor work and now you’re supposed to carve out time to lead someone. But that’s where we go wrong. We think, well, I’m still kind of doing the job.
No, you have a new job. You’re a manager, now you’re a leader. So we have to put on a new hat or a new coat or whatever it is, and think about, okay, well what is, what does the manager version of me do? How do I show up when I have to deal with conflict, when I have to give feedback, when I have to have hard conversations, and we wanna think all this stuff through, and I have an exercise in the new manager playbook to help you do that because it’s something that we really wanna do with intentionality.
Because an attention, this is a plan of action and now we have something to lean back on when we need, when we feel stuck. So I mentioned for example, if you wanna be a transparent and compassionate leader, well that’s all in good and well if things are going well, right? But what happens when you wanna be transparent and there’s layoffs coming and you don’t wanna talk to your team, you can’t talk to your team members about it, and you don’t wanna have one-on-ones in team meetings with them asking you stuff you can’t talk about.
So do you go and avoid and cancel all the one-on-ones and cancel team meetings and go silent for the next few weeks till you get more information? No, because you’ve set an intention as a leader. Now you say, Hey, what would a transparent leader show up that can’t share everything? Maybe you say something like, Hey, there’s a lot going on in the company right now. Some stuff I can’t really talk about yet, but I assure you that as I know more and as I’m able to share more, I will.
And so in our one-on-ones and in our team meetings, I’m gonna ask that, you know, you trust that I will share what I can, and we’re gonna talk about how you can be set up for success in ways that I can support you and your career, get through this time where there’s a lot of uncertainty. Whoa. Right. So much transparency without telling people all the stuff that you can’t really talk about yet. So that’s our first thing.
We’ve gotta shift into this intentionality. We have to really anchor to that because then that allows us to do the next thing, which is show up predictably, set expectations around that, and do some of our essential fundamental skills that help us operate as a manager. All the stuff I talk about in the book. And I think the, the other big piece is in recognizing that this is another job is also really owning that we deserve to be here.
A lot of new managers that I work with in my manager trainings and workshops and manager development program and coach one-on-one and myself, in my experience, being a first time manager, a new manager over a series of different managing experiences, I felt like, ugh, I hope the person likes me. I hope I’m, I’m, you know, I hope they, they think I’m good at being a manager. I hope this, and, you know, we, we kind of bring in a lack of confidence, some imposter feelings, being new to the role.
And even if we’ve done it for a long time, but we’re in a new situation, maybe we’re leading folks in a, in a division that we hadn’t been before. Maybe we’re promoted into a more senior role. And so there’s a new set of expectations on us. Maybe we have, um, grown our business and now we’re bringing in different kinds of leaders, and we’re thinking like, oh, are people looking at me? Like, who’s that? You know, that mindset will result in people looking at you like la Who’s that?
No. We want to show up with confidence. Of course, we wanna bring humility. We also wanna show up though with like, yeah, I’m a leader. Here’s what I believe in. Here’s what I stand for. Right? Set that intention. Here’s how I show up. This is when, how I deal with conflict. Here’s the great ways. Here’s how to work with me. Here’s how I like to have a hard conversations. Here’s the vision that I have for the team.
Now let’s walk this vision together. So it’s not all I, I’m saying I a lot. It’s not all I I, I, it’s that you’ve thought about those things so that you can communicate. You know, I’m here to bring out the best in the team. This is my approach. I’d love to learn from you, and these are some skills that I also talk about in the book around managing folks that maybe have more experience than you or that are older than you.
Right. Not just diminishing ourselves and, and saying like, oh, you know, I hope it’s not awkward because I, I got the job over someone that’s been here longer. No. Okay. So a lot of this comes down to taking a step back. Recognizing this is a new job, it’s a different job. We’ve gotta show up with a different mindset, and we’ve gotta be clear on what that is so that we can both communicate it and reinforce that in how we show up.
And I’ve heard it before, and, and, and it’s, it’s one of those things that it really hits when you think about it. The biggest builder of trust is predictability. It’s not just being nice and not having people like you and not, you know, just being friends with folks and, and it’s predictability. You show up in integrity with how you said you would, you follow through with this intention. When you say you’re gonna do something, you do it.
That’s what trust is built on. So that’s why this setting the stage and thinking of it as another job is so important because we can’t be predictable when we don’t know what we’re trying to do predictably, when we don’t know how we’re showing up. So this is my ask for you is to put aside this. It’s gonna be the same. It’s all, you know, whatever. It’s still me doing the job. No. Take a step back. Yes.
It’s still you. And think, Ooh, I’ve got a new job. This is a real opportunity for me to define what that’s gonna look like, how I’m gonna show up, how I’m gonna best support this team, how I’m gonna be advocates for them. Think about those things because this is such an exciting opportunity to really be able to bring out the best in your team and be able to really achieve the goals that you have because this is an opportunity you’re giving you, you’ve been given, right?
And like they say, you know, the old Spider-Man, uncle Ben quote, with great power comes great responsibility. So it truly is your responsibility to figure out what this is gonna look like in this new job. Okay, and that’s why I talk about all this in detail in the New Manager Playbook. Grab your copy today, Leah Garvin Do ah leah garvin.com/new Manager Playbook. It’s got it all in there because we want to set our team up for success so that they feel supported.
You know, when people feel invested in, they invest back. That’s what this is all about. It makes your job easier. And it pays off in spades. The more folks feel invested in, the more they invest back in us, the easier our job gets, and we’re all just humming along doing our best work. All right. Check out the new manager Playbook. I assure you it’s got everything you need in there and see you next time. I.
Questions this episode answers
What's the biggest mistake new managers make when they get promoted?
The biggest mistake is thinking the job is basically the same, just with a few extra meetings and direct reports added on. That belief stops you from getting the support you need and keeps you from thinking about how you actually want to show up as a leader. You end up knowing only what you don't want to do, like micromanage or be harsh, but you have no plan for what you do want to do. Recognizing that this is a genuinely different job is the first and most important shift you have to make.
How do I build confidence as a first-time leader without coming across as arrogant?
Set your intention before you step into the role. Think through what qualities you want to embody, how you handle conflict, how you give feedback, and what your vision is for the team. When you've done that work, you can walk in and say, here's what I stand for, here's how I work, and here's how I want to support you, without it sounding like it's all about you. Humility and confidence can coexist when you've actually thought through your approach rather than just hoping people will like you.
How can I be transparent with my team when there's something I'm not allowed to share yet, like upcoming layoffs?
You can be transparent about the situation without revealing what you can't reveal. Tell your team directly that a lot is going on, that there are things you can't speak to yet, but that you will share information as soon as you're able to. Then keep your one-on-ones and team meetings running so people don't feel abandoned. That's what a transparent leader looks like even in constrained circumstances. Canceling meetings and going silent is the opposite of transparency, even if you're doing it to avoid hard questions.
Why does setting a leadership intention actually matter for a new manager?
Your intention as a leader acts as an anchor when things get hard. Without it, you have nothing to guide your decisions in difficult moments. When you know you want to be transparent and compassionate, you can ask yourself what that looks like when you're in a tough situation, and that question leads you to a real answer. Predictability is the biggest trust-builder on a team, and you cannot show up predictably if you have not decided what you are trying to do predictably. The intention is what makes consistent behavior possible.
What should I do in my first weeks as a new manager to set the right tone?
Start by recognizing this is a new job that requires a new mindset, not just extra tasks layered onto your old role. Then define how you want to show up: what values you want to lead with, how you plan to handle conflict, how you will support your team's careers, and what your vision is for the group. Communicate those things to your team clearly. When people know what to expect from you and you follow through consistently, trust builds fast. That foundation makes everything else, including hard conversations and feedback, much easier.