The Introvert Leader

How to Go From Peer to Leader

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In this episode, I’m breaking down the awkward shift from being a peer to becoming a leader. You’ll learn what to watch out for, key mindset shifts, and how to lead with confidence from day one.
Whether you’re new to leadership or want to be ready when the time comes, this one's for you.



Timestamps
1:00 - Austin Update

2:32 - Why Discuss Peer To Leader Transitions: Why this moment is one of the hardest, most overlooked challenges in your career.

3:18 - What To Watch Out For: Four common mistakes to avoid when moving from peer to leader, based on lessons I learned the hard way.

8:15 - Mindset Shifts: The internal shifts you must make to succeed in leadership.

13:03 - Lead Effectively From Day One: How to earn trust, avoid early missteps, and set the tone with clarity and confidence in your first weeks as a leader.

19:35 - Story Time: A real story about a former peer who crossed the line—and the tough decision I had to make as a new leader.

24:39 - Challenge For Listeners: If you were promoted today, what would need to change? And why wait to start?



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 Hello, this is your host, Austin Hopkins, and welcome to The Introvert Leader Podcast.

Getting promoted doesn't make you a leader. Most people think that when you move from a peer to a leader role that all you have to do is get the title. The team's gonna respect you. Everything's gonna fall into place. Eh not right. That's not how it works. In fact, the actions you've taken before that, the way you carry yourself, what you're known for, that's what makes you a leader, not the title.

So it is a delicate transition moving from a peer to a leader. And I wanna break it down for you today. I wanna talk to you about the strategies, the things to watch out for, the mindset shifts you need to make because it's not gonna be as easy as you might expect. There is a little bit of nuance, a little bit of difficulty to it.

So before we do that. I wanna give you a quick update on what I've been into recently. So, just got back from a trip to the Grand Canyon with the wifey. We took the dogs, it was like a four hour trip. We get there, we open up the door, and I gotta tell you, the first thing that my dog did was run right for the edge.

I had her on a leash and we were getting outta the car and we parked pretty close to right to the actual ledge. And I gotta tell you, this dog, if I didn't stop her, she would've jumped into the freaking Grand Canyon. I don't know what's going on here. I don't know if it's just my lab. I dunno if she's stupid or if I'm a bad owner.

But anyways, we gotta laugh outta that. Put her in the car, took care of her, had a blast. Um, but honestly, I gotta tell you, the Grand Canyon kind of blew my mind. I like, I honestly looked at it and my brain couldn't kind of comprehend what I was looking at, the scale, the magnitude. Just absolutely, absolutely gorgeous.

Now that being said, I am terrified of heights. So I was walking like 30 feet, 20 feet back from the edge the whole time. 'cause I did not want to be too close and look over and God forbid, fall, that would be the worst, right? So other than that, uh, YouTube short, I posted my first standalone edited YouTube short last week.

I was really nervous about it, put a lot of effort into it. It was about how to ask for a raise. So if you're not already subscribed to me on YouTube, go subscribe, check it out. I think you're gonna like it. I'm always open to feedback, of course. And again, my whole goal is to be more on camera, continue to build out the YouTube channel while delivering.

You know the insights, the expertise I have on the podcast every other week. So I wanna jump into it and talk about why the conversation of moving from a peer to a leader is so important. So first off, the reason why I think it's important is 'cause it's not talked about enough. When I moved from being a peer to a leader, there was no rule book.

There was no guidebook, there was no videos to watch, there was no podcast to listen to. So I just kind of had to figure it out on my own, and honestly it was really challenging. So I don't want you to go through that. So that's why I wanna talk about it. I wanna share what I've learned. Make it easy for you because you might just think like, oh, we were friends before I was their peers before.

They're gonna embrace me as the leader. No problem. I. That's not always the case. And in fact, I'm gonna tell you a kind of a bad story at the end of an example of where it went wrong. So that's what we wanna talk about today. We wanna talk about the transition between being a peer and a leader and all that comes with.

So I want to jump into it and start with the things to watch out for. Here are the warnings. The things that you want to avoid, like the plague if you can. So I remember when it was 2013 and I stepped into my first leadership role. I made some of these mistakes. So I don't wanna sit here and pretend like I didn't make them.

I made most of these mistakes, and so that's why I wanna cover them with you. So, number one, the first thing to watch out for trying to be overly perfect or robotic, or changing who you are. So when you're stepping into a new leadership role, right? It can be a little weird. You might think that the best way to get people to follow you is to act super robotic and super professional and act like you are perfect, right?

Because you gotta be the leader. You gotta be the best. That does not work. People smell that a mile away and they're gonna look at you and say, Hey, like two weeks ago we were joking around having fun, and now we're supposed to pretend like you're some perfect executive. Like, come on, man. Like no one's buying it.

It's feels awkward, it feels inauthentic. So don't fall for this trap. Now, what I'm not saying is that you don't need to adjust your behavior as you move into a leadership role because of course you do. But what I'm definitely not saying is do not change who you are. So, you've heard me say this hundreds of times on the podcast.

I'm gonna continue to say it again. People follow and respond to people that are authentically themselves. So if you're a humorous type of person, I. You need to be humorous when you become a leader. Don't just change that. Don't just turn that off. If you're someone who is super organized, continue to be super organized, right?

Whatever you did before to get you in that position to get promoted, you want to keep that going, right? But also know that like you are going to potentially lose people. If you are changing who you are, drastically, people aren't gonna respond to it. Number two, micromanaging out of fear. So this is something I kind of struggled with.

I felt that I had to control everything when I moved into the new role. That the more I watched the details that I obsessed about the details, the more success we'd have as a team. It didn't work like that. In fact, when I micromanaged more, the team trusted me less. They pulled back, performance got worse.

'cause they were like, dude, you don't trust us. Like, what's going on? We, we've been performing this whole time. Why are you suddenly coming into this role and we now need to change what we're doing? Or report every little detail to you. You don't want to do that, so don't micromanage out of fear. I would tell you to lead with trust upfront, and then if trust is broken, if you need to make adjustments, so be it.

Totally. Okay, but don't micromanage. That is never, ever, ever the answer. Micromanaging does not work. I don't care what you've heard. I don't care if you've seen someone else, maybe pull it off successfully. It does not work in the long run. Number three. Uh, expecting everyone to adjust quickly or to like you.

So when you go from a peer to a leader, it can feel a little weird, right? And you might expect, or hope I should say that everyone is just an instantly going to embrace you. Austin, we're so excited to have you here as the leader, you're our, you're our guide, you're our guy. We're gonna follow you blindly.

You're the man. Everything's perfect. You're awesome. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's just not how it works. No, people are gonna take time. It's gonna take some time for people to respond to you. They're going to have to change in their brain that, oh my gosh, this was my friend. A peer, someone that I could tell anything to someone that could be down in the weeds with us, and now, whoa, it's my boss.

I. I've gotta figure out how do I approach that? What do I say? How do I respond? How do I act around him? So give your team some time to adjust to you. It's okay if it's awkward at first. It's going to be, I remember the first month, like I would walk into the break room and everyone would get silent. And before no one would get silent.

They'd be like, man, what's up Austin? And then now when I walk in, it's like. Everyone's looking around. They don't know how to read the situation or what to say. So give your team some patience. It's gonna take them a little time. They need to reframe how they see you in their brain. So number four, I don't know if you really understand the gravity of this, but as a leader, every single thing you do is being watched and measured.

Your team is watching everything you do, how you act, how you treat people, how you communicate, what standards you hold yourself to. And I just want you to realize that as an individual contributor, maybe there wasn't that there, right? You didn't have to worry as much about people watching you all the time.

You could kind of cheat things, not ethically, but you could kind of cut corners here and there. You know, maybe you didn't have to to be as precise because at the end of the day, no one's watching. But as a leader. Everyone's watching every single thing you do, and they're going to start to emulate that.

So if you are demonstrating good behavior, you might see your team then start to demonstrate good behavior. If you are demonstrating unethical behavior, bad behavior, rude behavior, you might start seeing them show unethical or rude behaviors themselves. So I just want you to realize. That's so, so important.

Again, the four things that I need you to watch out for as you move from a peer to a leader, trying to be overly perfect or robotic. Micromanaging out of fear, expecting everyone to adjust quickly or like you. And then number four, forgetting that people are watching everything. So watch out for those things.

Guard yourself to make sure that when you make that transition from peer to leader, it goes smooth and you don't make those mistakes. Okay, so I wanna transition slightly and talk about the mindset shifts needed. Going from a peer to a leader, this is not gonna be a cakewalk. And it will take some shifts, some, some intentional ways that you start to think about things and approach situations.

So there's four of 'em that come to mind. I have thought back to my career the, the shifts that I had to make that were the most helpful. So the first one. You are gonna have to shift from focusing on your needs to focusing on their needs. So as an individual contributor, it's safe to assume that on an average day you were thinking about your own needs.

Nothing wrong with that. You didn't have a team to worry about. You were thinking about what you needed, what wasn't going well, what you were gonna work on, what was important to you, what were your goals, all that kind of stuff, right? Well, as a leader. The more you think about yourself, the more you will alienate your team and the more you will dampen their performance and all that kind of stuff that you wanna see from them.

So you have to make the shift from thinking about yourself to thinking about your team. So what does that look like on a day-to-day basis? That means when you're going into situations, don't start thinking about what you need. Train yourself to start thinking, what does my team want? What do they need in this situation?

How are they feeling? What's going through their mind? It's gonna be weird at first, right? 'cause you're so used to thinking about your needs and what you want as an individual contributor, but as a leader, you can't do that anymore. So you have to make that shift. And the sooner you can make that shift, the more trust, the more buy-in you're gonna see from your team.

I've seen that myself, and I know that for a fact that it works. So number two, you have to make the shift from being comfortable all the time to being uncomfortable. What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is, as an. Individual contributor. Your comfort was pretty easy, right? You had your own needs to worry about, and as long as those were met, you were pretty good.

Things were good. You probably didn't get in a lot of trouble. People stayed outta your way. All good. Been there. I understand what that's like. But as a leader, you have to be comfortable getting out of your comfort zone because that's what it's gonna take to be a good leader. So some examples of what I mean by that is you're gonna be pulled outta your comfort zone every day.

You are going to be asked to do new things. You're going to be put in situations where you've got to maybe mediate stuff between teams or make tough decisions, and every day is gonna feel a little weird because you haven't been a leader before and you specifically haven't been the leader of your peers.

So I need you to just embrace that. It's going to be weird in the beginning. It's gonna be uncomfortable. That's okay. You didn't sign up for comfortability with this promotion becoming a leader. You signed up for the role of a leader and as the role of a leader. It's going to be uncomfortable. No one's telling you what to do.

No one's going to be holding your hand every step of the way. It's gonna be up to you to figure out what's best for the team, what you guys wanna focus on, what your vision is. Um, and also, you know, I'll, I'll be honest with you, it can also be a little uncomfortable sometimes because you're a little bit more lonely.

And so you know, when you're an individual contributor, when you're a peer of everybody, you got friends, you got people you talk to, so as a leader can feel a little bit more isolating. Maybe you don't have people coming up to you wanting to chat. So I just want you to keep that in the back of your mind.

It's okay that it's gonna be uncomfortable. Embrace that early on and it will set you up for success. Okay? Number three, you have to make the shift from. Not caring to extreme ownership. So I remember when I was an individual contributor, I cared about my own work and that was important, don't get me wrong, but like, if some other problem was happening within the team, I, I didn't make it my problem.

I didn't take it personally. I didn't really even spend a ton of time trying to solve those problems. 'cause I figured, okay, somebody else has got it. The team leader's got it. Um, that team member's gonna figure it out themselves. Well, that's just not how it works as a leader. Your team's problems become your problems.

So instead of not caring about little things or the details, or just the stuff that matters, that usually you were allowing someone else to worry about. So it's your job to start thinking, focusing and, and making sure that the details and those things that previously didn't matter to you now matter to you, right?

If you're not caring about those kind of things, nobody else on the team is. That's your new role to care about the entire team, how it functions and all that jazz, right? So when I think at the end of the day the shift is going from somebody else is gonna take care of it to, I'm gonna make sure it's taken care of.

That's the big shift. Super, super important. Gotta make that shift. Ownership is absolutely everything in leadership. Okay, moving on. Number four. You gotta go from blending in to setting the tone. As an individual contributor, you could kind of blend in, right? You, you come in, you show up, you do your work, you clock out all good, right?

You can kind of blend in. You know, you don't have to be the star of the show. You don't have to set the example, set. The tone didn't really matter as a leader, it's the exact opposite. There is no coasting anymore. You are setting the tone, the behaviors that you want your team to adopt, the vibe you want to create within your team.

It's all on you, so you have to set the tone, which means you have to hold yourself to a higher standard, which of course we'll talk about more later, but you've gotta set the tone. No more waiting for someone else to set the tone to take action. That's on you. Okay? I wanna transition a little bit and give you some real strategies, the things that you can start doing to make sure that when you go from that peer role.

Into the leader role you were set up from day one. So it really starts from taking action day one. And there's a few things that kind of come to mind that I did in order to get a fast start and really make that transition from peer to leader as smooth, as seamless as possible. So. Couple things I did.

Number one, serve the team. Don't put on an act. I said this from the beginning, but from the start, I don't want you to be worried about how you look or how you sound to your team. If you're worried about looking like a leader, you've already failed because leaders don't look a certain way. Leaders are leaders, right?

And however they act is how they act. And so I want you to realize you don't need to change or pretend to be something different or, or try to look really cool or really, you know, put together. Because again, like I said in the beginning, people are not going to respond to that. So what I do think you should do is find out what you can do to help your team.

That should be your. First focus. It shouldn't be the act or how you look. It should be how can I help my team? If you just put your head down and that is your number one goal in the beginning is what are the problems I can help them solve? What are the roadblocks that I can remove? How can I make their life easier?

If you do that, you'll get incredibly quick buy-in because at the end of the day, people aren't gonna be thinking about anything else other than, oh my gosh, look at this guy. He's helping me. Yeah, we love this guy. He's, he's solving our problems. He's making our life easier. Of course, we wanna follow him, right?

Who doesn't wanna follow a leader? That's. Actively putting their own needs second and putting the needs of their team first. That's really the key, is to get a fast start. Don't worry about how you look, worry about how you're serving your team. I. Okay. Number two, don't rush in and change everything. So as a leader, I, I, I think you probably wanna come in and put your own mark on things and really make sure that you start things off with a bang.

And it can be really tempting to come right in and start making changes. Well, this isn't right. We need to change it and I don't like how we're doing this, and I wanna make sure that it's better. And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You're going around, you're changing things. And a couple weeks in the whole team's like, what the heck just happened?

The entire team has changed. We're doing things way too fast. Like, whoa, slow down. So that's the key here. Slow down for your first month, I probably wouldn't really change much. I would really start to observe. Start to build relationships with your team. Observe what's going well, what's not going well.

Take notes, ask for ideas, right? And then feel free to make some changes, but don't come right in and make the changes. It's too fast, the team isn't ready for it yet. You need to earn your stripes. You need to earn their trust and make sure that they feel safe around you and that everything's in a good spot at that point.

Absolutely make the changes. Make it your own. Another one I, and I said just a second ago, is meet with everyone one-on-one. I really think the key to getting a fast start and making sure that day one you're successful is you're going around and chatting with people. So I went around to every person in my team, the people that I had been peers with just a couple of weeks prior, and basically told them here's what they could expect.

Hey man, I'm excited for the new role. I'm a little nervous. I'm not gonna be changing things totally on day one. All I wanna do is make sure that our team continues to function well. I wanna make sure I tap on you for any ideas you have. I wanna figure out what, like what's on your mind? What can I be doing better to serve you?

What's been going well here? What hasn't been going well, one-on-one, figure out where they're at, where their head's at, what you can do for them if you're focused on what they need Again. They're going to respect you more. They're gonna buy in more. And honestly too, you're gonna find that the results are better.

You're gonna find that if you are really working for your team as opposed to them working for you, results will always be better. I. Okay, number four, which is model what you expect. So I've said this multiple times today, and you might think it sounds a little repetitive, but I think it bears repeating.

You have to model what you expect. So in the very beginning, if you're gonna wanna see your team make some changes or start to do things differently, in order for them to do that, you're gonna need to model that. You're gonna need to show them that. And so I think a couple examples. When I think back to my first time moving from a peer to a leader, I was managing a branch, right?

Uh, at Bank of America. And you know, we would have a lobby that people would come into. And I told myself that I'm gonna be known as the guy who is in the lobby as much as possible. So I would stand out inside the lobby, in the front room, greeting people for six to eight hours a day. That's where I spent the most of my time.

I wanted to be front and center. I wanted to show my team how important our customers were and why. Being there attentive, being engaged and being proactive with our customers was gonna be the key to our success. So that was one way I modeled what I expected. Another one was, you know, I was noticing at my branch, we wouldn't respond to customers who would send us emails very promptly.

Sometimes it would take us a week. Sometimes it would take us five days, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are responding to emails within 24 hours. Bottom line, that's what we're doing, so you better believe. I started responding to emails within 24 hours, demonstrating that to the team, giving feedback when it wasn't working, and just really modeling what I expected.

So I think at the end of the day when you're, that, that new leader, they're gonna be looking for you to fail. Some of 'em are right. Unfortunately, that that's, that's just the, the reality of it. There's gonna be some people that maybe are not excited for you to take the job. Maybe they're jealous. Maybe they're, they thought they deserve the job.

So I need you to realize that, that that might be in the back of their mind. And so they're looking for ways for you to fail. So if you can model what you really want, you're going to eliminate that as a failure. Okay, number five, which is kind of maybe an underrated one, which is get some key influencers on your team.

In the beginning, this is so important. There's gonna be some people. I can tell you right now in your team, you already know there's a couple of people, maybe one, maybe two people that are the influencers, right? Everyone looks to them. They kind of, you know, set the vibe within the team. People look to them for direction, for advice, for, you know, what they should be looking at and what should they should be doing.

So if you can get those key influencers on your side early on, game changer. So how do you do it? Well, again, it goes back to meeting with them one-on-one and being brutally honest and like saying things like, Hey man. The team loves you. You're the guy. Everybody knows that in order to be successful, I need you on my team.

I need your help. I need your support. There's no way I can do it without you. So what do you need to be successful? What can I do to help you? And how are we gonna get there? Right? So you're instantly showing them like, Hey, I know your value. I know what role you play. I'm going to help you get better, and I need your help to help us get better as a team.

That really, really helped me out Now. There's always gonna be some bad apples, right? And I don't want you to worry about that because you can't control that and you cannot control how other people feel about you other than the things you can do, right? Which is how you carry yourself and all the things we've covered.

So I wanna tell you a story about when I first transitioned from being a peer to a leader and I. Give you kind of a worst case scenario of what it can look like when you make that transition and some of the risks and some of the bad stuff that that can happen. So, uh, it was my first year as a leader and maybe we're about six to eight months into my leadership.

And, um, I had, I. You know, obviously been managing all the people that I used to be peers with just a couple of months prior. And there was a guy named Justin, and me and Justin were close before, you know, me and Justin would hang outside of work. Um, you know, we'd go out and do social things, um, hang out in the break room during our lunches.

I mean, he was a cool dude. We vibed. It was great. Right. So one day Justin comes up to me, it's Thursday and he says, Hey Austin, I need to take Friday and Saturday off. I have some tickets that I won to a music festival. It's really cool. I really, really wanna go. Well, normally at that point we had been making the schedule for all of our employees about a month prior.

So at this point, there was just no way that I could let Justin go on this trip. Right? I, I really thought about how could we make it work, but we literally did not have the staff. To accommodate our customers. So we had to be there. So unfortunately I was like, Hey man, I can't, I can't let you go on Friday and Saturday, but what I can do is I can make it up to you.

You pick another day that you want in the next couple weeks, in the next month, I will do whatever I can to make sure you get that day off. No worries, man. He was not happy. He didn't like this, right? He begrudgingly kind of walked away from my desk and, and, uh, went back to his work later that day. He text me like at night after work and was like, Hey man, I just wanna let you know I'm gonna be calling in sick on Friday and Saturday.

So, you know, I can tell that he, he still liked me enough to gimme a heads up and not just not show up for work. But he was basically telling me, Hey man, I'm gonna. Call in sick, um, and I won't be there. And I was just like, Hey, man, you, you can't call in sick like you're not sick. I need you here tomorrow.

Like, you've gotta be here. We don't have the staff without you. I know this sucks, but again, I'll try my best to make it up to you, but we gotta have you here, so Friday. Comes around, he shows up to work like 10 minutes late. Strolls in pissy mood, just not in a good mood, huffing and puffing. Um, just not happy at all.

So I give him some time. I give him like an hour to kind of cool off, get his coffee, do his thing, and I kind of just casually go up to his desk and I'm like, Hey man, I know you're not happy to be here. I just wanna let you know. I do appreciate you coming in again, man. I got you. I'm gonna make sure we hook you up, whatever you need in the next couple of weeks and the next month.

And he was not happy this, this was just his boiling point. So he looks at me and is like, dude, this is fucking crazy. Fuck you. I don't want to be here. So he said literally those words and I just kind of paused and was like. Wow. This re guy just really told me to f myself, okay, what do I do here? So I didn't blow up on him or anything like that.

I just said, okay, man, sounds like this conversation's done. And I walked away from his desk and then I called hr. 'cause for me, once you cross my line, you cross my line. Like, I will give you respect and trust and everything. I will just give it to you up front without asking for anything in return. But the moment you cross the disrespect line, it's just, it just doesn't work with me.

I just have that line and that's my line. And I just don't go beyond that line. So I called HR and they said, you have any right? You want to fire this guy? What do you wanna do? So I thought about it and I said, you know what? I need to fire this guy. He was not respectful. He did it in front of everyone.

This is not the vibe I wanna set. I want people to know that that's inappropriate and it is never okay to talk to me that way, even if you're upset. So fire him. Um, later that day he's obviously pissed and you know, tries to kinda walk it back, but at that point it was just too far. So fast forward like six months to eight months later, I'm in the gym working out and I see Justin walk in the gym and at first I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't even know what to do.

Well, I haven't talked since this point. Like this, this guy gonna try to beat me up or whatever. So I'm like, all right, I'm just gonna make eye contact and smile. So I make eye contact and smile. He comes running over, we dap it up, we give a hug. Good to see you, man. No hard feelings. Hope you're doing well.

I hope school's going well, whatever. Right? And at the end of the day, we brushed it off. It was no big deal. Um, you know, I'm sure he probably wasn't happy that ha happened to him, but at the end of the day, I'm hoping it set him up for the next thing. I know he was going to school and he was able to focus more on that.

And I think he probably learned a good lesson that like. Even if you have a peer, someone that you're friends with and you're upset, you can't treat 'em that way. And so I tell you that story to show you what could happen when you transition from a peer to a leader, you're gonna have some weird feelings and dynamics and things that they maybe felt comfortable saying to you when you were a peer.

They may think it's okay to to speak to you that way. As a leader, it's not. And so you gotta realize those are the kind of things that can happen. But if you follow what I told you, right, if you focus on the things to watch out for, if you focus on getting a fast start, if you focus on the team versus yourself and not putting on an act.

I know for a fact you'll have a good experience. And even with this bad experience, I still had a good one overall. I was still able to get everyone else in the branch to, to follow along and we're able to achieve some amazing things in that branch. But yeah, it was a, it was a tough one and, uh, I thought you get a kick out of, uh, me sharing that with you today.

So I wanna transition slightly. Wrap up with a challenge. So I would like to give you something, a little bite-size, something that you could work on. And I want you to do yourself a favor, and I want you to look at how you've carried yourself the last month. And I want you to ask yourself this question, what would I need to change if I got promoted today?

So if the answer's not really anything, you're doing fantastic. You're right where you need to be. I don't want you to worry about it. Keep doing what you're doing. But if you ask yourself that question and there's a list of things you would need to change, what are you waiting for? Like what are you waiting to change those things for?

Are you waiting for the title? 'cause remember, leadership isn't a title. It's how you act. It's how you carry yourself. So make those changes. Hold yourself to a higher standard. And if you run into the situation where you're moving from a peer to a leader, I'm confident you're gonna be able to handle it.

Focus on the right things. Don't make it about you, make it about them, and you're gonna find success. So I wanna say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day.

This has been The Introvert Leader Podcast. Subscribe for new episode Wednesday.