How To Deal With Colleagues When You're The New Boss

So you got that promotion and now your peers are suddenly your subordinates. Experts explain how to make this transition easier for your new team.

- Amanda Visser

A team of peers may operate with relative ease when each member has the same rank, status and sources of power. When one person’s status or rank changes due to a promotion, this unspoken power dynamic changes too.

If you get that big job rather than your colleagues, some may be happy for you, but others may resent that they have been overlooked.

Katlego Kolobe, founder of Thrive Live Design, says all relationships have a power dynamic. This dynamic dictates how the relationships work.

“We must act and interact in correlation to our sources of power,” she says. Once a peer becomes the boss, their behaviour must change. But change is difficult for most people to handle and some may resist it.

Kolobe also warns against the new boss trying to remain “one of the team”. The power dynamic has changed and it will not be sustainable to ignore this.

Mark Murphy, the founder of Leadership IQ, says you can’t really control it if a few former co-workers becomes upset with you for getting the promotion. “Trying to discuss their feelings of anger is likely to make the situation worse,” he writes in a Forbes article.

The change in dynamics depends on the situation. If the co-worker has been promoted on merit and colleagues believe in that individual’s skills, then it is more likely that they will be supportive. Management’s decision may even be celebrated.