Your Team Already Knows Who Your Favorite Is

The part of leadership nobody warns you about, and what it costs the people you aren't spending time with.

I talked with a manager this week who just got promoted to lead the team he had been part of for years. Same people. Same work. Different org chart.

He wanted to talk about the friendships. How do you go from peer to boss with people you've been in the trenches with?

I told him the harder problem is the one he isn't thinking about yet.

Here's how I learned it.

Twenty years ago, I was half of a partnership.

I ran the business side. He ran the technical side. We were peers, growing our careers side by side, and we became close friends.

Then a reorg happened and I was elevated to manage the team. He now reported to me.

It was hard on him at first. He told me so directly, which is its own kind of gift. On paper, the relationship we'd built as equals had changed overnight. We worked through it because we both valued the friendship enough to do the work. He's still one of my closest friends today, more than twenty years later.

That's the version of the story I used to tell.

Here's the part I left out for years.

Everyone else on that team knew he was my best friend.

I spent far more time with him than with anyone else. He had access to me that the others didn't. Hallway conversations, lunches, the thinking-out-loud that happens before a decision is ever announced.

I wasn't hiding it. It didn't occur to me that I should. 

But every other person on that team was doing math I never saw them do. Whose read on a decision actually counts here? If I push back on him, am I really pushing back on my boss? Is it safe to say that out loud?

Nobody raised this with me. Nobody was going to.

A team that feels uneven doesn't announce itself. It shows up as people who stop volunteering the hard opinion, who agree in the room and hedge afterward, who bring you the version of the update they think you want.

When you were a peer, you got to choose.

You picked who you ate lunch with. You picked whose desk you stopped at on the way back from a meeting. That was yours.

That freedom is one of the things you hand over when you take the job.

Not friendship. You don't have to end anything. But you no longer get to be selfish with your time, because your time is now the clearest signal your team has about who matters here.

People say leadership is lonely. This is one of the best examples. 

And I'll say plainly that this doesn't get easier with rank. I watch senior executives fall into it. We're human. We have preferences about who we want to be around, and nothing about the job stops us from acting on them. That's exactly the problem. Nobody takes the choice away from you. Leading people well means you set the preference aside anyway.

One question worth asking yourself.

If I asked every person on my team who has the most access to me, would they all name the same person?

Most managers know the answer before they finish reading the sentence.

If they'd all name the same person, that isn't a character flaw. It's a normal human being behaving like one. But it's information, and it's information you can do something about this week.

You don't need to manufacture friendships with the rest of your team. You do need every person on the team to have real access to you, and to know it.

Even footing isn't something people feel because you told them it's true. They see it. They feel it based on where you spend your time.

Best,

Jeff

P.S. If you've just taken over a team you used to be a part of, and you can feel the old relationships shifting under you, let's get on a short call. We'll look at what's actually changed and what your team may be reading into it. Here's a link to my calendar.