The Player to Player-Manager Transition, Part Two: How to Help Emerging Leaders Succeed

In this month’s follow-up to June’s article on the “doer to doer + leader” challenge, we shift focus from recognising the problem to doing something about it.

June’s edition explored what happens when high performers are promoted based on personal output, but then expected to lead others without the time, structure, or being equipped with the right tools and approaches to do so. It’s a stretched role—and many people struggle to meet the brief.

This month we outline how senior leadership and L&D decision-makers can support emerging leaders to succeed in this tough transition.

Here we recommend three key areas in which to focus your time and investment if you want your player-managers to succeed.

1. Create Capacity and Capability to Lead

For these emerging leaders, the first challenge is capacity, not competence. These leaders often know what they should be doing (think: strategy, clarity, communication) but simply don’t have the space to do it. After helping them understand their transition challenge and brief, helping them create time is the first priority.

What that looks like:

• Reducing non-essential delivery or legacy tasks they haven’t yet handed over.
• Removing “invisible responsibilities” such as being the go-to for every decision.
• Blocking protected time for leadership activities like team planning, coaching, or strategic input and holding them accountable for this.
• Coaching them to shift their definition of value from “what I deliver” to “what I enable”.

If you could free up 5% of their time…
Use it to get into regular, future-focused conversations with their team—what’s coming up, where support is needed, how alignment looks. Communication is a responsibility, not an optional activity. This would be a clear step towards understanding and executing on that.

If you could free up 10%…Add in structured space for thinking and preparation—helping them to anticipate, plan, and make clearer decisions without being reactive. Without this time, the leader never shows up. The doer just keeps running the show, and the business gets more of the same, regardless of their title, and your high performing doer has accidentally become a growth inhibitor.


2. Elevate Others Through Delegation and Feedback

To make this transition, each leader needs to bring others up with them. That requires two skills, which are often avoided or underused: effective delegation and /or effective feedback.

What that looks like:

• Teaching them to delegate for development—not just to offload tasks.
• Encouraging “teach, don’t tell” leadership to build team autonomy.
• Equipping them with practical feedback frameworks so they don’t avoid difficult conversations.
• Reinforcing that feedback is a leadership act—not a confrontation

Emerging leaders often fear that delegation will result in more mistakes—or that feedback will damage relationships. But without either, they end up overworking and under-developing the team. There are simple and successful delegation and feedback approaches that are essential for any leader to grasp in order to operate effectively.  Leaders who elevate others are no longer the bottleneck. They create a team that thinks, solves, and delivers together—freeing up their time for higher-value activities and delivering through others.

3. Drive Performance Through Goals and Accountability

If your emerging leaders are still measuring performance by task completion, they’ll struggle to lead a team to anything beyond “done.” The real shift comes when they begin leading towards clear goals and encouraging accountability.

What that looks like:

• Helping them set team-level objectives, not just individual tasks.
• Showing them how to do check-ins that focus on progress, not just check-ups on status.
• Building confidence to ask the right questions: “What’s blocking this?” “What support do you need?”.
• Making accountability a shared conversation, not a top-down task.

Support your leaders to set goals and implement simple team rhythms—weekly standups, monthly reviews, feedback loops—so that accountability becomes the norm, and delegation and feedback are routine. Your leader needs to continually focus on what will enable the team.

If you can, share DISC Personality Profiling with your emerging leaders to accelerate their leadership capability. For example:

• Dominant styles benefit from learning to pause and involve the team before pushing forward.
• Influencers need to be reminded to focus on follow-through, not just enthusiasm.
• Steady profiles may need support to challenge underperformance more confidently.
• Compliant leaders can be supported to see progress over perfection.

All of the above increases performance clarity. Because your doers are high-achieving doers, who typically to date have benefitted from the clarity of personal financial targets, sharing clear expectations will be appealing, whilst also reducing noise and stress.

Seek Smart Support on Low-Cost, High-Impact Topic Areas

Supporting a player-manager is not about sending them on a one- or two-day course and hoping for the best, but rather recognising the demands they face and specifically investing in the shifts that will help them succeed.

These people already care. They already deliver. They just need to be equipped with some knowledge and a few practicalities to multiply their success through their team.

PROMIND Coaching provides a series of coaching programmes that deliver practical toolkits to equip and empower real estate professionals. You can find out more on this page.