Promoted Above Your Friends
How to deal with being promoted to managing your friends.
Listener Peter writes in:
I work with many people whom I consider friends, but am about to be promoted to manager. I am concerned how to go from being someone at their level to being just above them and managing them. I want to be able to do my job but not make them detest me.
Peter, the quick and dirty tip is to find your common goals and form a partnership with your employees around those goals.
You’re wise to be asking the question. One day, you’re hanging out with all your co-workers, scheming mercilessly about how to outwit that idiot boss you all report to. Then suddenly when you realize you just might be that next boss, somehow being on the receiving end of all that scheming seems much less attractive. Welcome to the wonderful world of management.
First of all, when you become manager, know what you’re getting into. Your job is to hire people, promote the stars, and fire nonperformers. That tension will always exist. But you can certainly do a lot to build a strong relationship with your employees.
You know why people hate managers? It’s because they think their manager is their enemy. The Evil Manager is there to work you as hard as humanly possible, at impossible quality standards. Your job is to valiantly resist do everything possible so you work as little as you can.
But there’s another way. Very few new managers know it, because they think being boss is about being bossy. But the best managers view their jobs as helping their people succeed. Your job as manager is to support your employees, so together, you can deliver results. If you’ll be able to keep good relations with your current friends, it will be because you all feel like you’re working together.
Align Your Interests and Roles
Get together with your new employees and be frank.
Explain your common goals and your new role: “We work for a company. They pay us to deliver. If we don’t deliver results, they shut us down, and we’re all out of work. So our job—all of us—is to keep things running smoothly, to keep us employed. As manager, my job is to help build a successful team. That means helping you do your job better, making sure you get rewarded when you do a good job, and helping people who are a bad fit move on.”
Then ask what they need from you. Listen and take notes. Also share what you need from them. Then together, review both lists. Agree on commitments: what you will do, what you will try to do, and what you won’t do. For example, you will give rapid feedback on people’s performance. You’ll try to schedule them at times they request. And you won’t fake their performance reviews or keep them around if they goof off without doing their job. (Personally, I am happy to let people goof off if they’ve done their jobs well.)
Get Mutual Commitment
Although my bachelor friends run screaming from the room when someone utters the word “commitment,” it’s fine for the workplace. Now that you agree, write it down and both of you sign it. Include the big goal—we’re here to make the store successful—and the commitments you’ll both make. This isn’t a legally binding contract; it’s just a way to make sure you’re clear about expectations and promises. This can become a touchstone for your relationship.
There’s no guarantee this will preserve your friendships, but it’s a start. By getting everything out in the open and creating an agreement together, you all own the working relationship. You can even get together, maybe over pizza and Juicy-Juice, and brainstorm how you can all help each other work better.
Keep Your Mind Aligned
If you truly live to make your people successful, you’ll be off to a great start. And even so, someday you’ll have to fire someone. That will be your moment of truth. If you’ve just become another bossy-boss, then you’ll cement your role as the Retail Darth Vader. Your people will rebel, blow up your death star, and make poorly-written sequels that you’ll feel obliged to sit through because you loved the first one so much.
If you’ve done a good job of looking out for the team, however, people will welcome you getting rid of a slacker. Ewoks will sing in the treetops, and you’ll narrowly avoid getting romantically involved you’re your sisters. And that’s a good thing. So look out for your people by getting joint buy-in to your roles, and become the boss everyone would love to have. May the Force be With You.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and email questions to getitdone@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. Get me and other great Quick and Dirty Tips shows streamed to your iPhone with Stitcher. Download it free today at Stitcher.com
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Business Team image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
