Right now, somewhere in your organization, a manager is sitting in a room that a newly promoted leader will never enter. It could be a board session, a peer leadership meeting, or even a conversation with the CEO. Someone asks a question about that new leader’s work, and in that moment the manager is either prepared or exposed. The new leader is not there to provide information, yet they are responsible for what their manager says next based on what that new leader shared or kept to themselves.
That is one of the less obvious responsibilities defined in leadership transition: making sure the person they report to never gets caught by surprise.
We tend to focus on the visible assignment when someone takes a new seat: fix the region or run the integration. But just as important for a new leader is getting their supervisor the information they need to know before someone else asks for it. However, it’s a balancing act and I’ve seen new leaders fail on either end of the scale.
The leader who asks permission for every move and the leader who says nothing until something breaks both make the identical mistake. Neither is fully owning their role and decision-making.
The leader who asks permission for every move and the leader who says nothing until something breaks both make the identical mistake.
The permission-seeker hands the choice to their supervisor before acting. The leader who stays silent holds on to a problem until someone else has to fix it. One offloads the decision, the other passes along consequences. Neither is what the organization needs from someone just promoted.
When a new leader continually asks for approval on decisions they were hired to make, pay attention. They may still be learning the business, but they are also signaling a lack of confidence in the new seat.
The opposite behavior can be just as damaging. If a new leader sees a problem and keeps it quiet because they believe communicating about it makes them look incapable, that issue could get larger by the day.
So the discipline is positioning. How much a new leader communicates matters far less than whether the content keeps their manager defensible. A new leader’s job is to keep the person above them well positioned to defend them in rooms they do not sit in. That means giving them what they will be asked about, and nothing they won’t.
This is where most new leaders flounder. Bad news feels like an admission of weakness, so they hold it, hoping to have it solved before anyone asks. The “bring me solutions, not problems” manager trained a generation to do exactly that, and it produces leaders who surface problems only once they have grown too large to contain. I counsel new leaders to run it the other way. A problem carried up without a plan is a decision handed back to a manager. A problem carried up with a plan attached is a flank protected.
It sounds more like, “This slipped, here is why. Here is what I am doing about it. Here is what I need from you.” Or, “I’ll update you within a week if I need more support.” These are the most trust-building messages a new leader can learn to say. They show that a leader sees the issue, is taking responsibility for it, and knows where decision-making belongs. When a new leader does this, their manager will not be the one explaining that leader’s silence in a room they are not in.
A problem carried up without a plan is a decision handed back to a manager. A problem carried up with a plan attached is a flank protected.
Raised early with a plan, the same problem gives the manager a chance to help or advise without taking the job away from the person who owns it.
The other failure is less obvious because, on the surface, it can look like good communication. Some new leaders run to their manager with every snag they hit. A peer will not cooperate or a resource is contested, so they take the issue to the boss for a ruling. The request may sound like, “I just want to keep you informed, and wanted to get your take on it.”
But if the real request is “You decide,” the manager is now doing part of the job that belongs to the new leader.
A leader I was advising brought me this exact scenario: “I have a situation. One of my leaders wants to promote someone on their team to keep them from leaving. I want to talk to my new manager about it.” The questions that would settle the matter had not been asked: the merits of the promotion, the business need, and the budget to support it. My counsel: put those questions to the team member first, and carry the issue up only if the answers required a decision above them.
There is a line between keeping a boss positioned with current information and asking them to run the business.
A new leader needs to identify the difference, and many of them cannot. The fail rate for newly hired or promoted leaders is higher than most organizations acknowledge. A three-year study by Leadership IQ across more than 300 organizations found that 46% of new hires failed within 18 months. The most common barriers to success involved interpersonal behavior, with inability to accept feedback as the most common single issue.
The lesson for executives is clear: promoting someone because they can do the work does not mean they can automatically manage the work. This calls back to the expectations no one spelled out. New leaders tend to treat the gap between their stated mandate and the role’s real demands as unnecessary to success because the organization forgot to make them explicit. But unwritten expectations matter, too.
A manager has a responsibility to make expectations clear. But a new leader has a responsibility to ask clarifying questions. Determining what success looks like and how frequently to communicate is a shared contract. Having that conversation itself is a test of leadership.
New leaders can express how they understand their role and ask where they have it wrong. In partnership with their manager, they can agree on parameters for independence and when bringing in a more senior voice makes sense.
No new leader operates without help. The goal is a leader who knows when to act, when to raise an issue, and when to ask for a decision, and who doesn’t ask a manager to discern the difference for them. The leader who builds clarity rather than waiting for it has already answered the only question that matters in the first 90 days: Can they carry the weight without handing it back?
The leader who builds clarity rather than waiting for it has already answered the only question that matters in the first 90 days: Can they carry the weight without handing it back?
If this maps to a transition you are watching, a short conversation is the place to start.
Schedule a Meeting with Richard Smith
Richard A. Smith is the Founder and Managing Partner of Benton + Bradford Consulting, a leadership advisory firm serving Fortune 500 executives and senior leaders. He brings more than two decades of Fortune 500 operational leadership, including roles at Walmart, Terex, INROADS, and Bell Oaks Executive Search. His advisory work is assessment-led and data-backed: he learns the business first, then diagnoses whether the gap sits in the leader or in the culture, and closes it.
