After years of sharpening your skills, attending to company priorities, and achieving stellar results, you’ve received the promotion to manager that had long been in your sights. Now you can lead that tight band of your former peers, and together you all can be rock stars.

That’s the plan, anyway, but it rarely works out quite that perfectly; sometimes, it doesn’t work out at all. And when that happens, often what we don’t see is that our identities subtly sabotage us.

Being successful in a new role is about more than being proficient in the previous role and more than just learning the skills of a new role. A work promotion also comes with the need to adjust our identity. Yet too often, employees and companies underestimate the psychological process inherent in moving up the corporate ladder.

If you are confident and successful in your work role, then it’s likely to become an important part of how you see yourself. You may introduce yourself with your job title, your role, or what you do. Perhaps it’s what you write under your name on that “Hello, my name is _____” nametag. In short, it becomes one of the primary ways you define who you are.

Our identities serve several functions for us. They give us a sense........

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