Promoted into a new peer group? 5 actions to settle quickly

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Article in a nutshell: Coaching speeds up newly promoted leaders finding their place and their voice in their new peer group by working through ‘how will I be perceived?’ worries. One of five positive actions coachees have taken to speed up how comfortable they feel in the group is to meet with peers 1:1. Existing members of a leadership team need to see the newcomer as an asset who brings a fresh lens the whole group can benefit from – but only if they encourage their new peer to express dissenting views and ask challenging questions.

Calibrating your voice in team meetings

When I’m working with newly promoted senior leaders in organisations that prize cross-functional working there’s something specific they consistently bring to coaching: how to find their fit and ‘calibrate’ their voice in peer group meetings. They want to be accepted by their new peers; be respectful of their tenure and to make effective contributions, and they’re worried about how to enter the space. These coachees are acutely aware of their lack of experience in comparison to their new peer group; they know their peers know they’re newly promoted; they’re mindful that their arrival in the group will affect the group…it’s all feeling a bit awkward.

What they want is to quiet their mind, feel confident and have a plan.

Mental gymnastics over managing perceptions

I wonder if any of this is resonating with your experience or being a newcomer or being part of cross-functional leadership team? You might be familiar with holding multiple permutations in mind about how you could ‘show up’ and what the likely knock on effect would be for each. “If I say X, might Y think…” and “If I share my perspective on Z issue, could A person construe it as…” type thing. If you’ve been through it you know this sort of mental gymnastics can be exhausting and performance-inhibiting if not worked through.

Enter coaching, a performance tool which cuts through the mental noise and provides a confidential space to kindle confidence and create a plan. Ultimately this type of coaching engagement is about shrinking the time it takes for the newly promoted coachee to feel credible, comfortable and to be contributing effectively on cross-functional peer group work.

Thinking about the work I’ve done with these thoughtful coachees the sorts of conversations we’ve had have covered things such as:

Working on how they view themselves.
Recalling positive feedback given during the promotion process.
Recapping why they got the promotion.
Flushing out fears and logically evaluating the likelihood of encountering them.
Building plans for developing relationships with each peer as an individual.
Designing experiments to test and evaluate different ways of ‘showing up’.
Raising awareness of their values and their strengths (using psychometrics such as Hogan MVPI and Strengths Profile) and how these could relate to the work of the group.

5 actions to find your fit as part of a new peer group

Here are five actions newly promoted leaders have generated in our coaching sessions in service of ‘finding their fit’ with new peers you can use too:

Collect evidence that your promotion was fitting – this is to shore up the view in your own mind that the promotion is deserved and that you can play a valuable role in their peer group.
Make a grateful and graceful entrance to the group – explaining they’re pleased to be in the role; looking forward to getting to know everyone; keen to play a useful part and that they intend to start by listening carefully and assimilating. Contracting with the group on how/when to ask questions when things aren’t clear.
Take action to get to know each peer individually – this makes time in the group more comfortable and provides context for why each person might behave as they do in the group.
Take action to understand what’s expected of the peer group as a collective, by whom and why – this largely comes through point 3.
In later meetings, ask for permission to share what you’re noticing – for example, about the group dynamic or about how the group seems to be approaching a particular issue.

How to help a new member of your leadership peer group get comfortable in the group.

Researchers who’ve explored how newcomer voice evolves have distinguished between what they call ‘voice behaviour’ and ‘employee silence’ (the deliberate withholding of input from important others in organisations[i]). They’ve also distinguished between newcomer ‘promotive voice’ (making suggestions and sharing ideas) and newcomer ‘prohibitive voice’ (highlighting issues and concerns). The researchers found that whilst people are prepared to do the former during their onboarding phase, they only gradually grow comfortable pointing out problems. This is a missed opportunity.

The takeout is this: if you want to benefit from the fresh lens your new colleague brings, you – as a peer or a line manager – need to actively encourage her to say what she notices and show appreciation for her candour even if it wasn’t what you expected or hoped to hear.

Five specific tips to support peer group newcomers:

Give your peer a glowing introduction in the first meeting, specifically drawing the group’s attention to her achievements and strengths/skills/attitude that makes her a valuable addition to the group.
Frame the peer’s arrival as an opportunity for the whole group to see things afresh and say you are looking forward to the new peer’s perspective precisely because she is new. Tell the group she’s an asset.
Try listening to the content of peer meetings as though you are the new peer and call a pause when things come up that the new peer wouldn’t have the context on. Be th person to offer the context or ask another peer to expand/explain so that the current conversation makes sense.
Encourage your new peer to ask questions and offer a view – particularly a critical or dissenting one – on what’s being discussed. “What’s your take on what we’ve missed?” “What have we assumed that we possibly haven’t realised we’ve assumed?”
Affirm your peer after she has made her contribution. What you affirm will depend on what she said, how she said it, how it related to the work of the group etc. The key is to attend to something that made a helpful difference to the group that you’d want her to repeat.

[i] Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10(1), 79–107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-054654