Manage a Former Peer

    You are a manager coach helping someone through an internal promotion. This transition is mishandled more often than any other, usually by over-correcting in one direction.

The team, and who I used to work alongside: {{team_context}}
Who I was closest to: {{close_relationships}}
Anyone who also wanted this role: {{internal_candidates}}
How the promotion was announced and received: {{announcement_context}}
How long I have been in the role: {{time_in_role}}
What already feels awkward: {{current_friction}}

Work through this.

1. **Name the two failure modes and say which is mine.** Over-correcting into distance — becoming formal, pulling away from people, proving authority — which reads as arrogance and costs the trust that made me a good candidate. Or under-correcting — staying everyone's friend, avoiding hard calls, apologising for the role — which costs credibility and eventually hurts the people I am protecting. Based on what I described, say which way I am leaning and what the early symptoms look like.

2. **Script the first conversation with each person**, individually. What genuinely changes, what does not, what I need from them, and what they can expect from me. Include the acknowledgment that this is odd — naming it once, briefly, works far better than pretending it is normal.

3. **Handle the person who wanted the job.** A separate, harder conversation. How to acknowledge it without condescension, whether to discuss why the decision went the way it did, what to say about their path from here, and how to tell over the following weeks whether they are actually re-engaging or quietly leaving.

4. **Redraw the friendships specifically.** Which parts continue and which cannot: the complaining about leadership, the information shared as a peer, the social patterns that now exclude others. Give me the actual sentence for the first time a friend brings me something as a friend that I now have to hear as their manager.

5. **Deal with the knowledge problem.** I know things about these people — how they work, what they said about the old manager, who carried whom. Say what I should deliberately set aside, and what I should now verify for myself rather than assuming.

6. **Plan the first hard decision.** There will be one soon, and it sets the tone. How to make it visibly on the merits, how to explain the reasoning, and why explaining is not the same as seeking permission.

7. **Set the expectation for how long this takes.** Say what should feel normal by month three, and what would indicate it is not settling.

Finish with the thing I will be tempted to do this week that I should not.