Eric Girard, author of the book Lead Like A Pro: The Essential Guide for New Managers, assists professionals in transitioning from high-performing individual contributors to effective people managers.

Eric discusses the psychological aspects of this transition, providing insights into managing change and setting realistic expectations.

This conversation is a comprehensive exploration of the challenges and triumphs that managers face in their evolution to effective leadership.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Podbean, or your favorite podcast platform.

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Managerial & Leadership Development

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini : How did you get to this point? You know, because you take care, such a specific thing, which is helping manager transitioning people transition into manager role. So is this something that you have always thought? Have you always had an interest? How did it happen?

Eric Girard: I got into learning and development in my teens. It starts way back in the Boy Scouts. I was a boy scout for years and years and I used to teach kids how to swim and paddle a canoe and row a boat, anything in, on or under the water. And I loved it when a kid would get something like get a skill, like how to make a canoe do what they wanted. And they would go, whoa. And I thought, Hey, I like teaching. Then I went to college and discovered learning and development and joined the Association for Talent Development. Back then it was the American Society for Training and Development, joined a student chapter and got my first job out of college teaching people how to use their computers. And that was okay, but it was, it felt like I was on a hamster wheel. I felt like I was just running, running, running, running, running.

So I went and got my master's degree in intercultural training and wound up traveling around. I taught English in Japan. I lived in Australia for a couple years and then when I came back from Australia, I thought, okay, it's time to really find my passion. And I wound up working for a cross-cultural consulting firm. And then I got recruited to come to Silicon Valley. So that started my 20 year sojourn in Silicon Valley. And I went from teaching new hires about the company, new hire orientation into employee development, and then eventually management development. And then I thought, aha, these are my people. This, I like this. So helping managers understand their new role, helping them move from being great employees, great individual contributors, and moving to being a great people manager and learning all those skills and there's a whole list of them was really rewarding to me. So that's where I, I wound up settling, was in the area of management development and I love it and I've decided to make it my life's work now that I'm out of Silicon Valley and I've got my own practice, that's what I do. I love helping new managers make that shift.

Stephen Matini: Because of your cross-cultural experience, is there something that you have noticed that is consistent in managers all over the world?

Eric Girard: You know, managers are people, actually, this is a funny thing that came up in a class I was teaching. So I'm in Iowa teaching a class for, at the headquarters of one of my biggest clients. It's the second day of a three-day class. And this one manager who had been pretty active throughout, they raised their hand and said, I just wanna say something. All managers need therapy. That was a big thing to say. And they say, yeah, all managers need therapy because if you don't take care of your own stuff, then you're not gonna be any good to your team. This person was making the case that it's really important to take care of your own stuff, the stuff that's going on in your head so that you can be fully present and fully there for your team. And I thought that was really good.

It was a bold statement to make, but you know, we were in a room where we could speak freely. And it makes perfect sense to me that just as people, we all carry a certain amount of baggage into the workplace. And I think it's important to deal with that. And when you're in a leadership position, whether you're a first line manager or whether you're a CXO, when you're in a leadership position, you need to be self-aware and you need to take care of the things that may hinder you from doing the best job possible when it comes to leading other people. I think that's a universal that I would mention

Stephen Matini: When I deal with managers, I deal with people very, very often that never ever took any sort of managerial development plan at all. So essentially finally they get to it when it's too late. So how do you address that issue with clients?

Eric Girard: Well, I would never say it's too late. My first suggestion is that there's always time to learn something new. There's always time to improve your ability to lead teams. And so I often will lead classes that are really meant for new managers. The content is fundamental, and yet people will still come to class, you know, Hey, I've been a manager for 10 years and I've never received any training and I'm really grateful to be here. So I don't see it as a problem. I see it as a, as a cost for celebration because you know, this person finally is gonna fill in the gaps. They've probably figured it out. If they've been a manager for 10 years, and I see this a lot, people have been managing for 3, 5, 10 years or more. And this might be their first or second ever management class. Hey, let's fill in the gaps and let's maybe course correct where you can be a little more effective and bring a little more empathy to your role. It, I would say it's never too late

Stephen Matini: Usually. Do you follow a specific learning path with new managers or you let them take the lead? How? Where do you start with them?

Eric Girard: Well, in my book I started with empathy. So the first chapter and the longest chapter is about empathy. And that as a human leading of the humans, you need to be empathetic and you need to be able to walk a mile in other people's shoes. Not to the point where you become a therapist or a counselor, but just being able to listen really, really well and attend to what the other person is saying. So, so I lead with that and then we start with making the transition. Okay, you were a great engineer, you were a great financial analyst, you were a great fill in the blank. Now you're leading a team of those people. Let's make the mental psychological transition to a leadership role. And then from there, you know, and the order of these things will vary a little bit once we've made the transition. Then we'll talk a little bit about goal setting, we'll talk about delegation coaching feedback, how to manage change, how to build trust. And these things all happen in slightly different orders. But when I wrote like a pro, I really thought through, okay, if I could write a perfect course, how would it be organized? That's what the table of contents of that book is all about is okay, you know, first empathy, then make the transition, and then all these other things kind of in increasing levels of difficulty and importance.

Stephen Matini: You know, I've never written a book, but I wonder because you went through that experience, what have you learned about yourself in the process of writing a book about something you love?

Eric Girard: This wasn't really clear to me until I got into the book. For six months I sat down and for an hour a day for six months, I wrote the book. You know, I just gave myself an hour every morning when I was freshest and I would, I would hammer out a page or a chapter or a paragraph, whatever I could get done in an hour. And that was fun. Recording the audio book, going into the studio and recording the audio book. That was fun. The editing the endless back and forth, not fun. I'm very much a big ideas guy, you know. So I will come up with a big idea. I will put together the framework and put together the skeleton, and then I'll ask somebody else to come in and, and do the detailed work. And I find that that's how I run my business as well, is I will have the big ideas and then I will say, Diana, Sandra Bill, could you please make this pretty? Because that's not my forte.

Stephen Matini: So you are a leader, maybe more than a manager.

Eric Girard: You know, in a micro business you have to do everything. So I can't completely just throw things over the fence, but I know where my strengths are and I play to my strengths and I ask other people to use their strengths. And I'm really open about it, you know, I have a horrible memory. I'm not good with detail, and the people on my team are. And so that's what I asked them to bring. And it works really well

Stephen Matini: As a manager. But in your case, as an entrepreneur, how do you choose good team members? That's a skill.

Eric Girard: It's a skill. There's a fair amount of luck involved in it as well. So I got lucky because two of the people that are on my team, I've known for years, and I know their skills. So for example, when I started Gerard Training Solutions, I thought, Hey, I can do it all. I can design, develop, deliver the courses, I can do the branded slide decks, I can do the books, I can run the website, I can do all the things because I'm very smart and can do all these things, right? And I immediately made such a mess of the website that I called my friend Sandra and said, can you please fix the website? And she came in and within a couple of days, I had a website and it was beautiful. So I'm like, okay, you're in. But I had known Sandra, let's see, I met her in 2011 and I brought her on in 20 20, 20 21.

So I had known her for about 10 years by that point. There was a combination of knowing her very well and then also knowing her skills. So knowing her as a person, knowing her skills, then I realized that marketing is very important for a small business. And through an association with somebody else, I met Diana. Diana is Colombian, she actually works in Bogota and she's a great social media manager. And so she was a referral and I tried her out and gave her a couple of assignments and they got, they were really good. So I gave her more and gave her more until pretty soon I'm like, would you like a role on the team? Then I decided that I wanted to start getting out in bigger outlets, getting my name out into bigger outlets. I wanted to publish in well-known magazines in my field, TD Magazine, training magazine, training industry.

And I knew that journalism is not my forte, but my oldest friend from high school, bill, I met Bill in 1986, and there's a whole story about how we met, but I've known Bill most of my life, like almost 40 years, and he is an outstanding author and editor and public affairs guru. And so I asked him if he'd be willing to, to write with me on these projects. And he said, yeah, absolutely. So having these people in my sphere of influence already and just having those skills and then being referred to pipe to people. So I always, I always trust referrals over cold outreach. And I really appreciate the fact that Diana came through a referral and then I gave her small assignments and then worked up and it's worked out beautifully.

Stephen Matini: One of the things that I hear quite often from managers, because managers work hours and hours and hours, you know, next to people like you with your team, is you inevitably not with everyone, with some people you become friends. So how do you manage, how do you balance boundaries? And the delicate relationship between a, this is a friendship, but you know, this is also a professional relationship.

Eric Girard: Yeah, that's really dicey. And I actually had a professional relationship blow up because the lines got blurred a little bit and it didn't go well, it didn't end well. So that was a huge learning for me. But with Bill, Sandra, and Diana, you know, we're all friends, like, we're all friends, we're all friendly, but when we're working, we're working. Like, for example, with Bill, we practically got our own language. You know, we've known each other for almost 40 years, and we've got inside jokes, we've got silly things we say to each other, stuff that would just, you know, not be appropriate in a work context that doesn't come out when we're working, when we're working. I am Bill's client and so there's a client boss relationship going on there. And as soon as the work is done, then that switch gets turned off and the friend switch gets turned on.

It's a really important distinction to make because getting too friendly or too comfortable when I'm asking him to perform an important task could lead to poor results, could lead to hurt feelings. So we're pretty professional with each other when we're working. And then when we're done working, then we can talk about our families and we can talk about, you know, that one time that silly thing happened. And we can talk about that when the work is done for a manager in a corporate setting. 'cause You know, obviously I don't work in a corporate setting anymore, but, but in a corporate setting, I would say what's really important is setting goals and setting boundaries. This is what I expect of you professionally. Here are your smart goals, this is what I need you to get done, and if it gets done or if you knock outta the park, no problems. If you start to have performance issues, then there's a path we need to take. And I have to take it as a representative of the corporation. And you know, I, I still love you, you're still my friend, but you know, we need to make sure that that goals get achieved. So I think that that's the, the number one thing when you're managing a friend in the workplace is have boundaries, have goals.

Stephen Matini: It sounds really difficult to me, really, and also, you know, boundaries. I have to say, in my experience, listening to a lot of people must be the one thing that drives people crazy. People either not being able to express their thoughts, feeling that, what is it gonna happen to me if I say what I have to say? And then not saying it, they end up being a pressure cooker. And striking the balance is such a difficult thing. Is this a topic that you ever talk with your clients? How does set boundaries.

Eric Girard: You know, on, on occasion I'll talk about, you know, setting boundaries and I will usually default to goal setting, which I've discussed, and a SWOT analysis and just being kind of clinical when it comes to assessing your team and what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses? You know, I would definitely talk with folks who are experts in workplace culture, talk with your HR folks and you know, talk about, hey, I wanna set a culture of excellence, of openness on my team of trust. I love Patrick Lencioni's, work on the five Dysfunctions of a team. So I would really focus on really building that baseline of trust so that people can say what's on their mind and not be afraid of it blowing up. There's resources out there for folks, I would definitely refer folks to Patrick Lencioni, definitely refer folks to setting goals and boundaries and being open about those, having frequent conversations about those. And then doing a SWOT analysis where you sort of stand back and say, okay, how are we in the four areas of swot? And you know, are there things that we need to fix or adjust in order to get the most outta the team? If

Stephen Matini: A team exist in a culture that is not a SpeakUp culture, it's not a transparent culture, communication, struggles moving, is it still possible for the team to become something of a happy island in which communication flows.

Eric Girard: Happens? All the time happened to me when I was working my first gig in Silicon Valley, actually, the, the company I worked at the longest, I was there for seven years, almost eight years because the culture was so good in our little island, we, our learning and development team was great at talking about issues, talking about things that were not working or were working. We supported each other. This is the team I was part of when I was diagnosed with cancer. And they rallied, they showed up, they brought food, they took me to my appointments, they were magnificent human beings. And that was inside of a company that maybe didn't have the greatest culture all around. But that team had a fantastic culture and I was very loyal for years to that team.

Stephen Matini: See, this is usually a difficult conversation that I had with managers. Like, to give an example, last week I was with three different groups of managers and all of them were constantly pointing out responsibilities that upper management has. And so we talked about different issues and they said, well, you know, we are here discussing these issues, but the people who could actually do something about it, it's them. How do you handle that rightful concern at the, the same time reminding people, yes, but you also have responsibilities in the matter. How do you explain that?

Eric Girard: If you've got a culture where people are pointing fingers, that's a little more fundamental, that's a bigger problem than just something you're gonna solve in a meeting. Building a culture of agency and self-advocacy and getting people to say, okay, the system we work in, the company we work for is not perfect. What can I do right now to move things forward? That actually brings me into the change management content that I teach. When we think about control and areas over which you have no control areas over which you have full control and areas over which you have some influence. And a lot of us will beat our heads against the wall, against things over which we have no control. I can't control how the CXOs, how the c-suite acts. I'm gonna have no influence over the c-suite unless you happen to have an extremely good relationship.

But most of us are gonna have no control over how the c-suite acts. What I can control fully is my own attitude, my own inner talk, my own self-talk, and the places where I can have influence is with my team. Maybe you can't control the weather, you can't control the stock price, you can't control the c-suite, forget about it. You can fully control your own attitude and your own self-talk, manage that. Just invest enough energy to keep that rolling forward. But those areas where you can influence, where you can influence your team, maybe you've got the ear of your team leader or your friends with somebody else on the team, that's where you can influence and that's where you should focus your energy. So that's how I would handle that question is by saying, listen, don't waste your energy. You know, don't beat your head against the wall trying to influence the c-suite. You're, you're probably not gonna do it. Focus on your own attitude and the attitude of your team members and build a culture inside your team that you want to be part of and move forward with that.

Stephen Matini: Working with a lot of managers, what would you say that is? The one complaint that you hear the most from managers? The one thing that drives them crazy.

Eric Girard: Most managers I talk to are, are just extremely time poor. There're just isn't enough time in the day because when you're an individual contributor, you're focused on your tasks, you've got your list, you know, you've got your project plans and you're responsible for that, and you get that done as a manager, you have to focus on getting results through other people. And so not only do you usually have tasks that you're responsible for, but you also have to get the team to focus on what they're responsible for. And so the, the two things that I really help managers do is first off, delegate, how can you learn how to be an excellent delegator and empower your team members to run with something and get it done and then let you know how it went. There's a fantastic article I bring up all the time, it's by HBR, the Harvard Business Review, and the title is called Who's Got the Monkey.

And it was an article that was written in 1974 and then republished in 1999. So it's got some real staying power and it talks about six different levels, degrees of freedom that you can have as an individual contributor that you can have with an, an agreement with your, your manager, everything from sitting, sitting on your hands and waiting to be told what to do all the way up to just handle it and don't even bother telling the boss. And then there's levels in between. So I would encourage any manager new or not to read that article. It's free on the HBR website and, and have a discussion with your team about how many degrees of freedom, how much freedom can your individual team members have per task. Learning how to delegate is number one, learning how to manage your time is number two, and everybody's gonna have a slightly different method of managing their time.

I use the Covey four quadrants, the urgency and importance matrix, which for history buffs folks might be interested. It actually comes from Eisenhower, president Eisenhower, learning how to manage your time and prioritize and then, you know, getting yourself some sort of a system that you will use. So I've got a system that works great for me, I wouldn't expect anybody else to use it because it's very peculiar to me, but the best system for you is the one that you will use. So whether it's using Asana or whether it's using your calendar or whether you batch things in email, find that system and stick to it and iterate it as you need to so that you can get the most important things done every day. And there's still white space on your calendar to have impromptu meetings with your team members and you get your job done as well. The individual contributor tasks that you have as a first line manager. So it's a delicate balance, but it can be done.

Stephen Matini: How would you respond to a manager who says, I understand that my job entails managing people, but I have all these tasks and that I need to take care of and I don't have time, you know, for people, I don't have time for meetings, I don't have time to build relationship with people.

Eric Girard: People. Yeah. That to me takes a shift in mindset because we're all busy, we are all absolutely busy, there's no denying that. And you have to honor the long hours that managers are putting in and you can't afford not to invest in your team. If you don't invest in your team, how are you gonna be able to properly delegate to them if you don't know their skills, if you don't know their strengths, if you don't know their weaknesses, if you don't know these people, how can you delegate work off to them to get stuff off your plate so that you have more time? So I would say that's crucial. You have to change your mindset. You have to get to know your team, you have to have one-on-ones, I would say weekly for an hour, biweekly for 45 minutes, pick something, but do it regularly and treat it as sacred time.

Don't mess with it rescheduling because something urgent came up in the business. Totally okay, but never just cancel with no reason. But have those regular meetings to get to know your team members and let them get to know you so that you can give them more and more responsibility. Because people are motivated, not so much by money, but Dan Pink in his book Drive talks about people being motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And you can help people develop autonomy, mastery, and purpose by getting to know them first and find out what they want to be autonomous about, what they wanna master and what drives them from a purpose standpoint. And then you can tailor their workload so that they can take on more and more and you have more time to actually breathe.

Stephen Matini: You know, some people seem to be really more on the task side, just the way they are as people, the way they think their personality. They seem to have this ability of thinking in terms of tasks more than people. And I love when you said that you open your book dedicating a lot of space to empathy. So can you teach to someone who's not particularly empathetic how to boost their people skills?

Eric Girard: Oh yeah, I talk about that in that chapter. You know, the whole idea of, you know, this is all nice Eric, but I'm not particularly empathetic. That's not my jam. I'm a task oriented person. That's okay. You can learn, you can learn to be empathetic, you can learn to listen. So I would re absolutely recommend Daniel Goldman's book Emotional Intelligence, do a little reading and read about emotional intelligence and how to build that. That's fantastic. Look for opportunities in your day-to-day life to do something a little different. So for example, talk with somebody who's got a different point of view than you on on anything. You know, you may not want to jump right into politics, for example, but you know, just, you know, a different point of view on how a work process should be done or how to get a particular thing done, listening to different points of view and trying to understand why that person thinks the way they think.

The whole point here that I make in the empathy chapter is trying to walk a mile in other, per other people's shoes. But doing that gradually, don't throw yourself in the deep end. I'm to the point now where I'm ready to do something kind of big for me. I think I'm a fairly empathetic person, but around where I live, there are a number of unhoused people, a lot of homeless people, and I carry in my car bags full of supplies for them. And so if I see somebody on the corner with a sign rather than giving them money, I'll give them this bag that has a little bit of food, has phone numbers for resources in it, might have a little clothes in it, just useful things that will help somebody, you know, be a little more comfortable rather than just handing over a $5 bill.

But I've never actually sat down and talked with somebody who is homeless and had a meal with them. So I'm actually gonna look for an opportunity to go to, you know, a place and have a meal with, with somebody who's unhoused and talk with them. There's a fantastic food pantry not far from where I live, and they, they offer all kinds of services as well. So I'm, I'm gonna start talking with Fish Line more and more to see about, hey, how, how else can I get involved? What else can I do besides just handing out these, these packets? That's gonna be, for me, a big step toward building more empathy toward people who are unhoused. And, you know, I'm not suggesting that listeners have to do that right away, but just take a small step toward could I have a conversation with somebody who has a different point of view than me? Could I go someplace that I wouldn't normally go? Can I go to a meeting that I wouldn't normally go to?

Stephen Matini: Eric, empathy is a wonderful thing, you know, energetically takes so much effort to empathize with someone. Do you ever get tired and how do you protect your energy by assisting so many people as you do?

Eric Girard: I wanna be careful. I'm not Mother Teresa, so I'm, I'm not, you know, out doing marvelous things all the time, but I'm just, I'm just trying little by little to do a little bit more and yeah, it's draining. It's, it's very, it's very exhausting. So I'm an extrovert. I love being around people, so I get recharged by being around people. I love doing this, for example, this is fun to me, but I also have time at home with my kids in front of the fire reading a book, just relaxing. If I want to totally relax and unplug, I'll read a book in front of our fire with, with the kids, or I'll go mountain biking or scuba diving or something like that and go get some me time to recharge a little bit.

Stephen Matini: Why do you think that you got so interested in managers rather than executives, white managers of all possible professionals?

Eric Girard: Well, there's a story to that. When I started in the Silicon Valley, I noticed, you know, the company that I was with was growing very fast. I was noticing that people were being promoted very quickly. One day they were an individual contributor. The next day they're leading the team and they made an absolute mess of it. They, they didn't receive training, they didn't receive guidance, they just said, okay, now you're leading the team, good luck. And it didn't go well. So being on the receiving end of that, I didn't like that very much. So, you know, that planted the seed. Then it was my turn, I got promoted. I didn't receive enough training right off the bat and I knew made a mess of it. I didn't follow any of my own advice, I just made a hash of it. So I walked away from that experience going, okay, never again.

Stephen Matini: What did you do? What did you mess up?

Eric Girard: I micromanaged. I didn't delegate. I gave very, very nitpicky feedback. Like it's embarrassing. I cr it was cringey, the sort of things that I did. Once I went through that, I thought, okay, never again. Never again. And so fast forward when we decided to move outta Silicon Valley up to the Seattle area, I thought, you know what, I'm gonna start my own company and that's gonna be my focus is helping new managers making that, make that transition.

Stephen Matini: Have you noticed any differences between female and male managers and the issues that have to deal with if two people, same age, same level professionally, one is a woman and the other one is a man. Have you noticed through your experience any differences in terms of issues they deal with, how they progress throughout their managerial development or they're not any difference at all?

Eric Girard: I haven't really seen any differences. I've worked with and around a lot of very strong female managers who, who did an excellent job and I've also worked for some who completely invested up just like their male counterparts.

Stephen Matini: The one thing that I've noticed, I've noticed, not in terms of capacity, obviously same thing, but in terms of feeling legitimate, feeling that they own a position. Sometimes I've noticed that a female managers, they seem to work at twice as hard as their male counterparts and there's a cultural component to it, at least here in Italy it's really, really, really strong. But you never notice something like that in the us.

Eric Girard: Not that I can think of now. It may exist. It's just not something I, I paid much attention to.

Stephen Matini: So in your job that you help people transition into a managerial position, do you ever help them managers transition towards a leadership position? So moving up higher.

Eric Girard: My focus is primarily helping folks make that first transition. If you think of the leadership pipeline, that first transition into first line manager positions, a lot of what I would recommend to folks who are looking at, you know, making that next transition is, I would say read the Leadership pipeline. Fantastic book there. And then I would encourage everybody, everybody to read the first 90 days fantastic book to help folks make transitions, whether it's from individual contributor into management or from management into more senior leadership, maybe from a senior manager into a director position or director to vp. Those are a couple of really valuable books I'd suggest.

Stephen Matini: I would suggest for them to read your chapter on empathy. That to me is the first thing to understand what it means to be a leader. How do we explain to people the difference in simple terms between being a leader and being a manager? Because a lot of people get confused. It's, they're two things.

Eric Girard: It's kind of a fun puzzle that, because I think in order to be a good manager, you also have to be a good leader. But there are a lot of good leaders who are not managers who don't have any leadership position at all. And so, you know, the qualities of leadership in terms of being able to get people rallied around a vision to help folks see this is where we're going, I will get us there or we will get there together. Those are qualities that, that a manager needs to have and a leader needs to have. And I think that there are in some instances where you've got folks who have the manager title, but who are not leaders. And I think that, that that's where you, you wind up with problems. So, you know, a good leader is somebody who can build trust. A good leader is somebody who can create a culture of inclusivity and making it okay to speak about issues openly, who can do conflict who focuses on results. Those are all elements of leadership that, you know, a person may have whether or not they have the title of manager. Does that make sense?

Stephen Matini: It does, it does. You know, one thing that I started thinking recently, and there's no really logic to what I'm saying, just in my pure observation, sometimes I think, boy, it is so hard to be a manager. I mean, these people really, they're in between, they have this bizarre position. They have to listen to the people on top of them and they have to manage the one below. And so sometimes I think it seems to me that maybe being a manager is so much harder compared to people that have a, a higher opposition. What do you think?

Eric Girard: I'm not sure if it's any harder than a position above it. A lot of folks, what I've seen is it's, it's they're kind of taken aback or they're shocked, you know, because I was a great engineer and all I had to do was, was crank out my code and, and I was fine to go from there to, oh wait a minute, I have to do that and I have to lead people and I have to manage processes and you know, I have to make sure that all the TPS reports are right and I have to make sure that everybody's happy and engaged. That sometimes is a bit shocking. What happens typically is once somebody's been through that transition, and then as they move up the ranks from manager to senior, manager to director and so on, is that they just get more used to it and they get more skilled at managing their time. So they're not completely stressed all the time.

Stephen Matini: When people start working with you on their managerial skills, how long would you say that it takes them to transition and to feel comfortable being a manager?

Eric Girard: Well, it's not instant, that's for sure. You know, it, it's not something that you come to my class and then, you're a manager and it's all, it's all better. It's a psychological transition. There's a difference between change. So the title changed. Okay, so you know, I walk into your office and I am a senior specialist and I walk out of your office and I'm a manager. The thing is, the change, the psychological process that we go through, that's the transition. And that could take weeks or months, it goes faster if you've got people to talk to. It goes faster if you know what to expect. But you have to allow people to go through their own change curve. So Elizabeth Kubler Ross came up with, with a change curve that was based on her grief curve. And I use a simplified version of it where you've got denial, resistance, exploration, and commitment.

And it's okay to go through all four steps. It's okay to resist for a little while. The fact that your old job has ended and now you've got a new job, that's okay, but you can't get stuck there. And so having somebody to talk to, whether it's your employee assistance program, whether it's your HR manager, whether it's another trusted manager, having somebody to talk to, to move on toward exploration, and you start to see what's in it for me and what will I get from this onto commitment. And okay, you know, now I'm a manager, I've left the old job behind, I've got my new job and I'm ready to go. And that could take days, weeks, months, it's gonna be different for everybody.

Stephen Matini: And it's also really hard because sometimes when I work with clients, they want everything now. And in the past we used to say, well you need to have at least a year to feel comfortable in a new position, let alone to become a manager. But now everybody wants everything now, you know, sometimes I'm asked, we want you to do a coaching intervention with this person. How many coaching sessions do I have? Five say, what do you want me to do in five sessions? The timeframe, you know, is becoming smaller and smaller, which I don't think is fair to people. Exactly for the reason you said it. There's a curve. Every single person is different. It takes patience and we don't react the same way. You know? What are the first sign in terms of changing the mindset that you notice in someone