by Venchito Tampon | Last Updated on July 18, 2017
How do you draw a line on being a close friend to your subordinates and being their immediate manager?
Building relationships with your team members is important to easily get them to follow instructions and let them learn from your mentoring and training sessions. To inspire your subordinates is the best leadership mission you want to walk through in your entire management years.
However, when friendship overtakes your authority and it becomes a detriment to your job as a boss, it won’t be too easy for you to get out of it and in most cases, might negatively affect how your boss (to whom you directly report) and your other subordinates perceive you as a manager in the company.
Here are three advice you can apply today if this situation happens or near to happen in your office.
Note: These tips are difficult to apply but if you don’t take any actions as sooner as possible, it would be more difficult for you to solve this.
1. Set the HOUSE rules.
There might be a case where you’ve been promoted and your friend becomes your subordinate, the initial feeling is to be awkward with how you relate with him or her. In this case, you have to set office rules properly. These rules aren’t your company’s policies and agreements – these are typically given during their first days and weeks when they enter the company, so don’t bother to talk about those things anymore.
What I mean with your own office rules is your direct reports, your KPIs (key performance indicators), what you want them to provide to you at the end of the day, week or month and what working style (employee to employer) would best fits for both of you. This way, you are helping your subordinate and your friend understands what you want your working relationship with him/her looks like.
This helps him see the bigger picture of work and set that mindset that work is work (in Filipino, walang personalan, trabaho lang).
2. Build authentic relationships with your other subordinates
Oftentimes, that certain case of having both a subordinate and a friend results to favoritism in any form and worse comes to worse, office gossip.
Prevention is better than cure.
One way to prevent those bad things to happen is to build authentic relationships with your team members.
Don’t always go out for lunch or dinner only with that friend. Invite your other subordinates to dine out you both. You want them to also feel that they are part of your team and not wanting to just be exclusive to certain people.
3. True friendship never ends after the performance review
Its performance evaluation and promotion time and you have to decide whether or not to give the right feedback and/or promote your friend.
My best tip for you is to set your emotions aside. Remove your emotions from decisions. When you rely on your emotions alone, i.e. thinking about what that person might feel if he or she is not promoted, you might face an unpleasant consequence for your actions.
Think about this way: true friendship doesn’t end if you make the right decisions.
It’s better for you to see the bigger picture. Ask yourself, what does the company requires from both of you?
That is to get things job done, right?
If that’s the case, whether or not your friend will be promoted, let him understand that you are doing it for the company and that’s the reason why you are giving him that kind of performance review.
It’s tough. Painful.
But you have a choice to make the right decisions.
YOUR TURN
Do you have any experiences managing your subordinate at the same time your true friend?
How did you handle it?
Or maybe you have a follow-up question.
Either way, leave a comment quick below.
I’ll be around today to reply to comments and answer questions.
So if you have a question or thought, leave a comment right now.
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