Your Employees Are Not Your Friends

When someone is fortunate enough to be promoted early in their career and start overseeing a team, it’s easy to misunderstand the new dynamics between one’s role as the boss and the team members who now report to them. You might have even been friends with some of your team members, and overnight, you find yourself managing those friends. Let’s make this clear: the promotion changes everything. As a boss, you now have significant influence over your team members’ financial well-being, promotions, workload, assigned tasks, and more. Ignoring this power dynamic is a mistake.

Throughout my career, I have seen too many young professionals who try to ignore this new power dynamic. They genuinely believe that they can continue to be friends with their team members and enjoy casual and frank conversations about everything, including their personal lives. While this might not create immediate conflicts, over time, ignoring the power imbalance will lead to problems and potential HR nightmares. By the time annual performance reviews or compensation discussions come around, everyone realizes that the old friendships have changed.

My advice? If you accept a promotion and oversee a team, you can continue to be friendly and supportive to all your team members (and you should), but don’t treat your team members as friends. Maintaining a healthy level of distance will benefit everyone in the long run. Being professional and supportive of your team members is more effective than pretending to be friends during working hours.