(A Story Most Leaders Won’t Admit)
You’ve earned the promotion, the one you’ve worked toward for years. And for about a week, it felt exactly like you imagined it would.
Then the meetings started, the politics surfaced, and the people who used to be your peers became your direct reports. Something shifted in every conversation you had with them, and your manager stopped providing you with the detailed feedback you had relied on. Decisions that once felt straightforward now carried weight you hadn’t anticipated. And the leadership skills that made you exceptional in your last role started to feel surprisingly useless in this one.
Nobody warned you it would feel like this, so you assumed it was just you.
It wasn’t.
The promotion gap is one of the most common and least talked about challenges in leadership development.
This is what happens when high performers move into leadership roles: the technical skills, the subject matter expertise, the ability to deliver individually, all the things that got you noticed, suddenly matter less. What matters now is how well you can bring others along with you. It matters how quickly you can read a room, navigate competing priorities, and earn the trust of people who don’t automatically give it because your title changed.
Nobody teaches you this. You’re expected to absorb it, somehow, between back-to-back calendar invites.
Now you try to lead the way you were led, or the way you think leaders are supposed to behave. You work harder, over-explain, and hold more meetings or fewer meetings. You second-guess decisions that you’d have made confidently six months ago. And underneath all of it runs a quiet, persistent worry that someone is going to notice you haven’t quite figured this out yet.
The loneliness of that position is real and is more common than anyone admits.
The higher you move, the less permission you feel you have to say, “I don’t know how to do this.” Leaders are supposed to look assured and capable. Like you have a plan. The gap between how you’re expected to show up and how you actually feel can become exhausting to manage.
And the hardest part is that the people around you are often the last ones you can be honest with. Your team needs your confidence. Your peers are navigating their own version of the same thing. Your manager assumes you’re settling in fine, so you keep going, and you get better at hiding it.
But the gap in your leadership capability doesn’t close on its own.
What actually closes the gap is developing the right leadership skills.
The transition from excellent contributor to trusted leader is not just a mindset shift; it is a skills shift. Specifically, it requires building collaborative leadership skills that allow you to lead through influence rather than authority, to create alignment between groups with different agendas, and to make others feel genuinely heard and valued in ways that translate communication directly into results.
This is exactly where business relationship management skills come in.
As a leadership discipline, BRM gives you the practical skills to navigate that shift with intention. It provides the tools to build your leadership capability to understand what your stakeholders need and how to collaborate across competing priorities without losing yourself or your integrity in the process. It develops your ability to create the kind of trust that makes people want to work with you, not just work for you.
It is not about being more polished or more political. It is about becoming genuinely more effective at the human side of leadership, which turns out to be most of the job.
Our BRM workshops and courses exist for exactly this moment in a leader’s journey.
They’re designed for the person who is capable, committed, and quietly wondering why this feels harder than it should. What you will walk away with is not just confidence. You’ll immediately gain the collaborative leadership skills and capability you needed on day one of that promotion. If any part of this felt familiar, you are exactly who this is for.
Lead and Succeed
Our coaches, Elka Schrijver and Peter Lijnse, have both won the prestigious Arnie Award from the Business Relationship Management (BRM) Institute for their work to embody, enhance, and promote business relationship management knowledge throughout the global BRM community. They have been actively involved in the BRM Institute since it was founded in 2013 and have been contributing authors for several components of the BRM Body of Knowledge and certification courses. They are currently writing a series of practical, user-friendly books about mastering business relationship management leadership skills.