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It is 5:00 pm on a Tuesday. The team has gone. You are still at your desk, drafting an email about a change you did not decide and cannot fully explain, to people who will read it very differently. One of them is on a one-year contract. One is waiting on an answer about an accommodation. One has watched a restructure before and knows how it went.
Six months ago you were the strongest practitioner on this team. That is why you were promoted.
I have watched this pattern repeat in coaching, and I went through a version of it myself. What makes it painful is rarely the difficulty. It is the interpretation. Most new leaders quietly conclude the problem is them. Far more often, the problem is that nobody mentioned they had taken a different job.
The particular trap in our sector
Career development is intensely client-facing work. We are trained to listen, to hold space, to sit with someone’s ambiguity without rushing to resolve it. Those are real skills and they are usually why someone gets promoted.
But leadership asks for things that practice never rehearses. Allocating scarce capacity among people who all need more of it. Making decisions that disappoint colleagues you like. Giving corrective feedback to someone who was your peer last month.
The gap is not small and it is not unique to us. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that almost 60% of first-time managers received no training at all when they moved into their first leadership role.
What makes our sector distinctive is how rarely the gap gets named. CERIC’s Survey of Career Service Professionals found that limited support from institutional and organizational leadership ranked among the top factors affecting practitioners’ ability to deliver their services. Yet professional development in this field concentrates, understandably, on client-facing competence. We invest far less in preparing the people who will lead them.
A CERIC study cited in a review of sector resilience found that half of responding practitioners intended to leave the sector.
And the team is not one team
The team you are now leading is among the most diverse in the Canadian professional landscape – multilingual, often internationally trained, frequently drawn from the communities it serves, and sometimes employed on funding that runs out.
That changes the work. Change does not land evenly across a group like that, so a message that reaches half the room may genuinely not reach the rest. Psychological safety is not distributed equally either: speaking up, disagreeing or admitting a mistake does not carry the same risk for everyone at the table. And the practitioner who always seems to get the client needing interpretation, or the file nobody else can hold, is carrying work that never appears in a caseload count.
None of that is visible from the practitioner’s chair. All of it becomes your responsibility from the leader’s.
What carries over, and what works against you
The useful reframe is that this move is neither a clean break nor a simple extension.
Carries over well:
- The coaching stance. Asking before telling works as well with a team member as with a client.
- Tolerance for ambiguity. You already sit with people who do not know what they want. That is much of leadership.
- Seeing capability before it is proven. We are unusually good at this, and it is the foundation of developing people.
Works against you:
- Absorbing pressure to protect others. With a client, containing anxiety is a service. With a team, it means your people never build capacity to handle change themselves, and a leader running on empty transmits anxiety faster than any message does.
- Solving it yourself because it is faster. It is faster. It is also how you end up doing two jobs and developing no one.
- Assuming one way of communicating reaches everyone. It rarely does, and the people it misses are seldom the ones who tell you.
Four things that help
- Separate the conversations. Coaching, delegation and feedback are three distinct skills, not three moods. Coaching invites someone to find their own answer. Feedback tells them plainly what needs to change. Saying which one you are doing, out loud, in the moment, removes an enormous amount of confusion.
- Check that your message landed, not that you sent it. After the next significant announcement, ask two people who are least like you what they understood by it. The answers are usually instructive.
- Notice who is carrying the invisible work. Cultural brokering, informal interpretation, the most complex files. Then ask whether it is distributed by capacity or by habit.
- Build boundaries and support structures deliberately. Not when things calm down; they do not. The questions you most need to ask – Am I being too soft? Did I handle that badly? – are ones you often cannot put to your own team.
If you are not there yet
You can build evidence before the title arrives. Chair something. Lead a project. Supervise students, volunteers or a summer team.
And if your leadership experience was built outside Canada, do not assume it travels on its own. It rarely does. Make it legible: name the scale, the decisions, the outcomes. I had to learn this myself, and the curve was steeper than it needed to be because I assumed the record would speak for itself.
Back to Tuesday
The email still has to be written. What changes is what you think it means that it is hard.
Leadership in career development is not an advanced form of practice. It is a different job sitting next to the one you were excellent at. That is not discouraging to know – it is the most useful thing you can know, because it turns a private sense of inadequacy into something concrete. A set of skills you have not learned yet.
Nobody told most of us. It is worth telling the next person.
