I recently spoke with a teacher who’d just received a well-deserved promotion to lead the teaching team they had been a part of for years. Their first leadership position! The promotion was a great achievement, but they now faced a challenge that many new managers face – the tricky balance of maintaining friendships with former peers.
Could they maintain their friendships with people they were now managing?
Here are my thoughts:
MANAGEMENT IS A GOOD TEST OF FRIENDSHIP
I have found that management is a test of whether a friendship is real: if it’s a genuine friendship, the other person won’t be angry at you and expect you to just do them favours. Instead, they will empathise with the difficult situation you’re in. They’ll know that it’s not personal and will see it from a commercial perspective. They’ll also want to preserve the friendship, meaning you’ll have to go to less effort to ‘manage’ them. You’ll also find, if they are a genuine friend, that you can have a conversation to sort out most problems, which barely feels like a manager/employee conversation.
Not all friendships will be this solid type, however, and I think it’s the friendships that are really just workplace friendships, where the person you’re managing is uncomfortable with the new power distance as opposed to being pleased for you, that the issues arise. Unsurprisingly, friendships with this dynamic are harder to preserve – and, would you necessarily want to? Yes, it’s nice to be liked, but you may need to find peace with it being a different kind of ‘liked’. I.e. being liked because you are a good, fair, friendly boss, as opposed to a friend.
A FINAL REMINDER
For the friendships that prove to be stronger, you’ll need to be careful not to favour your friends over others in the decisions you make, as you could end up very unpopular with the other team members (and potentially in trouble with legal/HR for showing favouritism). For example, you won’t want to exclude them from evening teaching without a good and justifiable reason.
Three resources to help you be a better boss-who’s-a-friend:
- How to cope when you become your friend’s boss:
https://hbr.org/2020/09/what-to-do-when-you-become-your-friends-boss - The pros and cons of workplace friendships, and how to maintain boundaries between being a friend and being a boss:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/workplace-friendships - The characteristics of a great boss (whether you’re managing friends or not):
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/being-a-good-boss-isnt-easy-heres-how-to-get-better
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