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Don’t be unfair
On the one hand, some people fall into the trap of “I’m your boss,” relying too much on formal authority. On the other hand, people fall into the trap “I’m your friend.” Now, you should not use friendship as the source of power to influence people to do things on the job. Friendship is not supposed to be something that you’re doing as a means to an end; it’s an end itself. And it’s really unfair if you’re “the boss” if you’re saying to a person: Do this because you’re my friend. So indeed, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have friendships at work. Some of my best friends come from work because, frankly, I work long hours and I work at an organization that I like the kinds of people I work with, so it’s not surprising we socialize – even people who report to me. Not saying that at all. What I am saying, though, is that I shouldn’t assume that they should do things because I’m a friend. Instead, I should be able to explain to them why it matters – have expertise relevant to helping them get why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Put boundaries in place
I was talking to a manager the other day who told me that he’s in business with one of his best friends. And sometimes – I guess the best friend reports to him – and sometimes other people think that he shows favoritism toward this friend. So one of the things they recently instituted to kind of help them get their relationship right and put the boundaries in place that are appropriate, was they now have two emails: a friendship email and a work email. And again, relatively artificial, but they also did agree that the boundary was getting confused and it was making the rest of the group uncomfortable, and indeed they needed to put those boundaries in place.
Have difficult conversations
So one of the questions I often ask new managers when they’re trying to think about, when does being a friend get in the way of being able to do business properly. One of the areas that we all know is that we should be giving feedback to people who work for us. Because people need feedback to really improve, and even very very senior experienced managers hate to give feedback. It’s tricky, because we never want to hurt people’s feelings. We never want to get into difficult conversations. Well to give performance feedback to someone who is your friend has a fair amount of awkwardness in it, obviously, because you love or adore your friend or whatever it might be, but they may not be doing so well on that job. This is not something that they’ve done their best work. And you need to tell them that because that is your role as, if you will, the boss, to let them know how they’re doing so that they can improve.
Now some people it turns out, I will say, though, find it easier to give performance to people they know well and have a good relationship with, and some people find it harder. It depends; there really are some differences here. But often, if it is a friend, and you tell a friend, “By the way, you’re not getting an A, you’re getting a B, and that means you’re not getting a bonus,” you know, there’s an inherent conflict there between the friendship and doing that. But I think when you are in those kinds of relationships you have to be prepared to talk to the friend about the fact that this might happen, and I think very few people really are. It’s not accidental that in a lot of partnerships where you have friends, when the friends are in very senior positions it’s not unusual to have to hire a facilitator or an outsider who comes in on occasion to kind of help you keep these things straight.
So for sure, you want to build caring human relationships with people, but the thing that we do know is that sometimes as a boss you might have to engage in what one of my colleagues refers to as ‘necessary evils’, i.e. you might have to do harm to one individual for the collective good, and if that’s a friend that’s really hard, because it’s very hard to keep the friendship going once you’ve had to do something like that. Which is why, again, we know family businesses and businesses when you have partners that are friends have some complicated dynamics that you have to work through. But in the end, you’ve always got to do what’s best for the collective good.
I once wrote a case – and this was a family business, a little different than a friend but a little closer than a friend, probably – where a brother had to fire another brother. And needless to say, the family did not have a good time at the next holiday dinners. On the other hand, when the mother came and spoke to the executives about the situation, she described how the family would’ve been destroyed if this hadn’t happened because the wealth of the family was so tied to this business. And she was forever indebted to the younger son for actually taking this action, even though it was devastating for her and she thought it was devastating for that son to have to do that.