by Karen Yvonne

Created on: January 09, 2009   Last Updated: December 06, 2011

You've worked hard, demonstrated skills or capabilities that distinguish you from your peers and now you've been "rewarded" with a promotion into management. Congratulations!

If you have already been doing the job you've just been promoted into, your promotion provides formal recognition of your role, probably includes salary or other benefit increases and validates your company's confidence in you.

If the job will be new for you, your promotion indicates that your company believes strongly in your ability to take on the new responsibilities and is giving you the authority you will need to carry them out. Your salary and benefits are probably also increasing.

In either case, you have just moved from individual performer to group performance facilitator. Your personal performance will ultimately be judged by how well the people you are responsible for perform. You may be charged with meeting production output levels, developing a software product, managing accounts payable, meeting certain sales goals or caring for patients on a hospital ward. Regardless of your group's goals, it is no longer about you, but about the people working for you and how well you motivate and manage them to accomplish the group's business objectives.

Staff management, or what I like to call performance facilitation, can be deeply rewarding, confusing, frustrating, or all of the above. In extreme cases, it can be so daunting that it limits your effectiveness. Your relationships will be different and you will use different skills.

New managers, and frequently even experienced managers being promoted to higher management levels, can be faced with staff challenges they didn't anticipate. Your relationship with your former peers, other managers and managers at the next level, needs to change. You need to expand your sphere of influence and knowledge about the company, its practices, its policies and its group and personal behavior expectations. You need to become familiar with your staff's goals, potential, performance issues, schedule restrictions and compensation (if you will be responsible for administering salary). If your former peers were also personal friends, you need to be careful about appearing to favor anyone in particular and discrete about personal information.

You may be surprised to find that once the initial celebration is over; your staff, even people you thought were friends, are not all on board with your promotion. Don't take this personally; they probably wouldn't

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