The WORST advice I've ever received in Leadership

Please don't follow this advice

The WORST advice I've ever received in Leadership?

"Your team shouldn't be your friends"

My team are some of the people I'm closest to in the world. Together, we have:

💥Pulled (and massively grew) a small business through a global pandemic
💥 ... then sold it to a FTSE100
💥 travelled the world
💥 Been side by side through grief, heart break & change
💥 had some of the most difficult conversations with each other you can possibly have with another person
💥 Stayed up all hours of the night in a tiny office replying to clients on the other side of the world

If I wasn't friends with the people I'd done that with... Honestly life would be miserable.

I posted this ^ on TikTok a couple of days back and got SO MUCH backlash of people saying things like ‘Leaders shouldn’t have friends because it creates bias’…

I’m calling that out here, because it’s SO TRUE and SO IMPORTANT.

Bias exists everywhere. Most of it completely unconscious.

For Leaders, we need to become as conscious as possible, about every one of our biases. Racial bias, confirmation bias, all of them.

What we’re never going to be able to do is eliminate bias existing, and making ourselves miserable by not allowing friendships to avoid bias. Instead, a much healthier (and more likely successful) way of doing this, is to bring all bias into your conscious mind. Acknowledge it, find ways of putting hard stops to allow it to impact your decision making (Just realised I need to do a whole new post on bias).

Please enjoy work. There are stats flying around everywhere on this one, but we spend about 1/3 of our ENTIRE LIFE with our colleagues. Please don’t make yourself miserable by not allowing yourself to form friendships.

Yes we need boundaries... but why can't the people we spend MOST our waking time with (colleagues) be those we laugh, cry and be friends with too?

Join in the discussion on Linkedin

Pic of me with some of my work friends, having a lovely time in the office this week, as we do every week