Oh, Grow Up! Relations Between Managers and Their Former Peers
If you haven't yet read Maura Schreier-Fleming's post "It's Time to Change," do so - it's career advice you may need right now.
Maura, whose AllBusiness blog is The Real Deal: Success for Women in Business, takes the Sherry Sherrod video incident as a point of departure to reflect on the fact that all of us will be more effective if we change as our lives toss us new challenges.
That point struck a chord with me because it echoes one of the most consistently-asked questions from newly-promoted managers: how can I remain friends with my former peers? In the tug of war between personal preferences and responsibility - oh, what the heck, let's just call it by its old name: duty - Shirley Sherrod chose duty and did the right thing by her position.
As we grow we not only have to take on the new joyfully, we have to shed the old - regretfully. Since I was first confronted with the question of how to relate to former peers, I've handled the issue in different ways, and I've had to shed some of my own innocence, my own desire to believe that we can have it all - that we don't have to give anything up as we move up in the organization.
Alas, it ain't so, and my answer is now, "Sorry, you can't still be friends." Your relations may and should be cordial and based on trust, as in any healthy team, but "friends," no, I don't think so, unless by "friends" you mean that vast cloud of people on Facebook you've been thrown together with that you don't even know.
In fact, your professional effectiveness depends on not preserving the same relationship as before. You'll now have to be dispassionate, neutral, disinterested (as opposed to uninterested) towards your old colleagues, since you have to evaluate their performance, among other duties.
And here's the clincher: by attempting to re-create the old, familiar atmosphere, you're imposing unfairly on your direct reports, because unlike you they're under no illusion about how things have changed. There is now what the mediation trainers call a "power imbalance," and you're doing no one a favor by pretending it's not there.
So you can't confide in your subordinates, either. That's why you should have a professional or executive coach.
Tough, eh? Especially for those folks who, long after Mad Men but before Nine to Five, still remember the age of free and easy fraternization, of the ritual of having the boss and his wife (yes, those days) over for dinner, and vice-versa, and the bowling league, and a social life that centered around one's work unit - including the boss. Despite the era of the New Smarm, with excessive hugging all around, there are signs that trend has exhausted itself, at least in a business context, and most particularly with gender equality in management. A peer hug is one thing - a downward hug is an abuse of power.
We're not in Japan, where all the guys get falling-down drunk every night and rag on the boss - who's also there getting falling-down drunk - and everyone shows up for work the next day and all's forgotten. (Although I always used to wonder....).
The lesson for managment training is to make sure you deal with this quesion (ask participants to list typical situations where this is applicable), and impress on them that after you're promoted it's noblesse oblige - you have to behave better, and that means behaving differently. For the increased authority and higher pay, there's a price to pay in responsibility.
As Maura writes, "Just ask Shirley Sherrod."
