While work was still quite enjoyable and some people blossomed under you, others didn’t. You were also unaware that your personal output was starting to suffer.

More time passed and continued good performance, along with adequate to good results from your team, as well as possibly length of service, put you in line for more responsibility and a larger team.

Now with five or more people reporting to you, you are having trouble getting to work you were so good at years ago, let alone excelling at it. A greater proportion of your team are not performing as well as you felt you did. Management seem a little disinterested in your specific work and are talking more about your teams output being not quite what they expected from such a high performer as yourself.

You have become an Accidental Leader. Your excellence in your field has resulted in you moving into people leadership, about which you have little if any training, without you even realising it.

This is an all too common scenario. The Peter Principle is about being promoted one step beyond your abilities due to your adequate performance at previous level. This issue is more about being given a job in another profession. Medium size business is faltering at middle management levels where great “doers” are being forced to try and reproduce their output in others, without any of basic skills needed to do that.

There is no logical reason why someone who is a great developer, graphic designer, fireman or mechanic would have skills required to replicate same results from a team of people. Maybe they might be great technical coaches, passing on experience of work to a number of other like skilled people, but leading a team is a very different challenge.

At most basic level, unless every team member is a “mini me” of leader, what drove them to success of their job, is not going to work for most of team.

This is where I have found myself.

How many of you out there feel same?

Success is not always something you necessarily find when you arrive. It may be journey that gets you there.

It seems as though people make career management more difficult than it has to be. When something threatens to make it simple, they almost invariably find a way to make it more complicated. For example, in recent years there’s been much more activity in small to mid-size companies, yet majority of people looking into a job change or career move continue to scour newspapers for classified advertisements, all while complaining that there are so few meaningful opportunities. If they had resources to scan 300 leading newspapers and publications in U.S. they’d still find relatively few meaningful opportunities. According to U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics, historically, most of better positions are never advertised. According to R. L. Stevens Associates’ CEO, Randy Stevens, 70 to 80 percent of meaningful jobs go unadvertised. If same people would only get out into market and make some new friends—contacts, they’d see new opportunities, perhaps just around corner.

Easier said than done? Unfortunately, yes. Most of us have never been trained in this sort of work. Even most senior managers may be novice in a job change or career search and can become discouraged. Still, there are a couple of basic concepts that, understood, can make job searching less complicated.