Leadership Lessons Every First-Time Manager Should Know
By Kirsten Penaloza - Former CX executive, coach, and Organizational Consultant working with leaders to create kick-butt teams and healthy work cultures.
We’ve all seen it, experienced it, or done it: An amazing performer, a top individual contributor, is promoted to a management position without people leadership experience. Now what?
This is how the plot usually goes: After the promotion, the only explicit expectation we get is that we’re now responsible for other people’s performance, the team’s metrics, conducting 1:1s and performance reviews, ensuring PTO is approved, having the right headcount, and sitting in leadership meetings.
As if that isn’t challenging enough, in the rarest cases, we are handed a playbook on how to lead. There is plenty of good literature, some with very practical advice, but isn’t it often just theory until we start experiencing leadership situations in real time? That’s where first-time managers often fail or, at minimum, make a lot of avoidable mistakes.
Support Driven member Miles Goldstein wrote a comprehensive article that covers key aspects and offers helpful pointers for first-time managers. Here are my top takeaways:
Delegation is a "What + Why" skill, not a "How" skill. New managers are told to delegate, but the trap is either under-explaining or over-explaining by doing the task for them. Give the destination and the reason it matters — skip the step-by-step for competent people, or you've drifted into micromanagement.
Culture and personality aren't the same lens. Miles moved from Southern California to New England and had to relearn how trust gets built — friendly-and-fast reads as pushy in some cultures, standoffish in others. That’s a universal law, even for companies within the same state or city, because a company culture is its own microcosm with rules governing acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Your intentions do not equal their interpretation of your leadership style. Walking the floor to check in with his team felt friendly to Miles. But they experienced it as surveillance ("cube checks"). It’s an invaluable reminder that management behavior is read through the recipient's lens, not the leader’s.
The IC-to-Manager shift is a skills reset, not a promotion with additional steps. Subject matter expertise got you hired. But leading through vision-setting, coaching and developing your team members, and giving/receiving real-time feedback are what the job is about as a leader. In other words, your success is determined by your team's success.
Worthy Reads
Tackle Churn in the Beginning of the Customer Journey
How often have CX leaders been hired to fix a churn problem when it’s too late? I certainly have, and each time, it’s been a lost battle. Because leadership at the top doesn’t make churn prevention a strategy that starts at the beginning of a client journey, co-owned by CX and Sales. The Same Team Handoff (by Support Driven member, Salvador Cervantes), argues that the moment a SaaS deal closes is exactly where revenue quietly starts leaking: A rushed sales handoff forces Customer Success onboarding to rebuild context from scratch, which tanks customer confidence, which kills retention, which forces sales to sell even harder to backfill the churn they caused — a full-circle problem where sales and CX both lose.
Many CX leaders will feel validated when saying that his proposed solution is actually quite simpe: Get sales and CX leaders to build one shared handoff SOP (not two SOPs that "talk" to each other), hold a 15-minute internal alignment meeting before any customer call, and have the sales rep join that first onboarding call to personally vouch for the CSM — turning a cold handoff into a warm bridge, with AI doing the tedious doc-filling in the background. Bottom line: the handoff isn't paperwork; it's the cheapest and most efficient retention effort a company owns.
AI Done Well
How come that AI didn't threaten 8,500 IKEA jobs? Only because their leadership had the right intent. It was never about saving money at the cost of people’s jobs. It was about what to do with the $17.1 million saved and the freed-up time of their employees. When "Billie," the chatbot, started handling nearly half of customer calls. The mindset was not "who's expendable now?" but "what can our people grow into?" That single reframe turned into a €1.3 billion interior-design business — because it turns out where AI fails, humans remain pretty great at nuance, taste, and relationship-building; who knew, right?
Klarna took off in the opposite direction: They opted into AI to replace headcount, bragged about the $40M in "efficiency," and then spent the next year quietly rehiring humans once customers discovered that a bot has approximately zero empathy for their overdraft crisis and a limited ability to fix nuanced billing issues. And all CX leaders collectively cried out: “I could have told you that!”
Same technology, opposite outcomes — because AI doesn't have intentions, leaders do. It's not just a strategy or "the robots are coming" problem; it’s a mattering problem.
Ask yourself: Are your people a cost center, or a growth engine? IKEA chose growth. Klarna chose the opposite, which turned into a very expensive lesson of lost reputation and brand trust. Read the full Inc.com article here.
