Top Tips to Surf through RELATIONSHIP ANXIETY

Over the past year, a rising source of anxiety for first time managers of people in teams has been how to relate to friends who are now members of teams they lead. These friends cover the spectrum from intimate friends they meet with socially, to befriended individuals who participated in the same teams as themselves, before they got promoted.

As a first-time team leader- whether titled segment team leader, territory team leader, advanced analytics team leader, test design lead, or any other of the proliferating titles for this role- you may even have previously exchanged personal grievances about management, with some of them.

Now, you have effectively joined management ranks. You find yourself in perpetual internal conflict with what you believe your company’s often implicit new team leader role expectations of you are, and simultaneously holding back from executing on some of them. You may not even always be fully aware of why you find yourself so emotionally entangled.

Common sources of ambivalence are not wanting to;

• Lose long-standing friendship benefits
• Be seen as elevating yourself above peers
• Act disloyally to former peers

When you accept a promotion to lead team members, either reporting directly to you, or in an influencing capacity, accept that you will have to adapt how you have conducted yourself before. You have assumed accountability for ensuring team members produce outcomes the organisation values, as contributory to strategic goal accomplishment. Essentially, you have acquired decision-making powers affecting their careers and work experiences.

When you are on this ambivalence track, recognise there are ways to explore switching from it, to gain better perspective of the proficiency demands of your new position, and useful attitudes and behaviour to adopt.

1. Adopt a more expansive map of relationships

This is the first time in the careers of many team leaders when serious consideration has to be given to self in relation to others and how they appear to them.

• Inevitably, you may trust your friends more than others in your team. Regardless, unless you can build trusting working relationships with all team members, your ability to influence them to take required action will be constrained.
• Managing individuals shifts the focus to relationship-management through which performance is secured.

-Your emotional connection with the rest of the team will influence their behaviour, and in the end, their performance.

-Communicating to your whole team, as early as possible, what the organisation expects of you in your new role, and how you will exercise it, sets the tone well for your leadership intent.

• If you do not communicate the way forward, friends will assume nothing has changed between you and them.

– They may even anticipate a continued flow of information on what is happening in the company, that you may acquire privileged access to, and that they do not have a need to know. This is what some new team members have come to discover.

• Creating dysfunctional team dynamics will reduce team performance and undermine your own standing as team leader.

2. Value the importance of role boundary management

Differentiating social meetings from work meetings seems obvious taken at face value. In practice, this proves otherwise, because we care deeply about not offending our friends.

• How you behave socially and the information you exchange with friends, should not extend to discussing fellow team members, as may have been your habit previously.

-When others are referred to in an unfavourable light, being mindful that you represent the whole team and not only parts of it, will support you in acknowledging the feedback, and still remaining impartial.

• Another oversight is ignoring the behaviour of friends who take up too much space in team meetings, shutting down others’ views, and risking groupthink, because you do not wish to ruin your friendships.

-Bear in mind too, it would be naïve to think that all your friends would want you to succeed.

-Some may unconsciously still be competing with you, having been in the running for your promotion. 

• Maintaining a distinction between your private and work life gains prominence at this time too.

-One senior team leader battled with this distinction in the mistaken belief that to do so would make him an inauthentic leader.

– Inadvertently, bringing his private life to work was accompanied by bringing his moods associated with it to work.

– His team members noticed this. They experienced him as unapproachable and unsupportive on days when he was unhappy or frustrated, and so avoided him.

-This led to regular retrospectives with them, because outcomes were repeatedly unsatisfactory, due to his guidance not being sought, when team members needed it the most3.

3. Disassociate being liked or disliked from performance or behavioural feedback.

We are emotionally programmed to be more accepting of positive than negative feedback.

• Although positive feedback inspires higher motivation, actionable feedback about unacceptable behaviour and performance, communicated clearly and thoughtfully, can still be experienced as growth-promoting by recipients.

-If you only give glowing performance and behavioural feedback, you could paint yourself into a corner, by raising expectations.

-Disgruntled team members will pressure you to know why their remuneration and upward mobility prospects in the organisation are not equally glowing.

• More generally, fear of falling out of favour with team members is the undertow holding team leaders back from attending to the quality of team task outcomes, as well as how individuals’ behaviour affected them.

– These are legitimate leadership responsibilities, even if an organisation prefers soft-touch leadership.

 Leaving some of your past behind involves loss and unavoidable emotional discomfort. Acknowledging and welcoming this opens the way to embracing your new relationship management role requirements.