Maintaining a strong personal relationship with staff doesn't preclude giving tough feedback; on the contrary, it supports it by creating a base of trust that you can rely on when things get difficult.
Even letting someone go can be done with compassion, and that is supported by a strong relationship.
OP says:
> And worst of all, as is happening to the friend I mentioned, you will have to lay-off people who don’t deserve it, just because the company says so. > > Good luck doing that if everyone in your team is your buddy. I learned it the hard way, the first time I had to fire someone.
Having had to do this a few to times, my perspective remains that I want to build strong, personal bonds with my team. Doesn’t matter where I sit in the hierarchy, people that connect and communicate well just work better together.
It absolutely fucking sucks having to fire good colleagues and workplace friends, but that’s a feature, not a bug. It should feel bad! That’s part of the human experience. If you make yourself mute to these emotions, you’re doing yourself a disservice in the long run.
I understand your point and view, but I don't agree. I don't agree because, as a manager myself, it's already hard enough to do this even if I don't have any special relationship with the person. If I had it, it would become stress and mental health issues.
So if true personal friendships are allowed, either the kind of person like the one I am should never get into management or we have to endure this extra pain that ends up affecting our personal lives.
It's not healthy to dissociate yourself so you can do harm to others. Doing harm to other people should be hard and if it's not hard, that is a mental health issue. The society we live in is fucked up, and being well-adjusted to a sick society isn't a measure of health.
That doesn't mean you never do harm to others: sometimes all your options harm someone, and the best option is the one that does the least harm. But in those situations you can have a clear conscience if you do your best to minimize the damage within the options you have.
> So if true personal friendships are allowed, either the kind of person like the one I am should never get into management or we have to endure this extra pain that ends up affecting our personal lives.
Good people aren't ideal capitalist robots, and ideal capitalist robots aren't good people.
That doesn't mean good people can't ever be in positions of power, but it's certainly more difficult to get there without making ethical compromises.
Whenever I've been in seriously challenging situations at work, having real, deep, personal relationships with my team made it far easier to have difficult conversations.
Forging real bonds gives you a foundation that you can actually build a strong team on top of: you can have tough conversations from a position of empathy and compassion; and if you need people to just "get it done", it's much easier to ask a friend to do you a solid and just get the work over the line.
Not just that, but people are willing to go above and beyond for empathetic leaders without being asked/cajoled/whatever.
Yeah, the article is right that laying off your friends, who likely did nothing wrong, sucks, but I think everything else can be done more or as effectively if you take time to build a better relationship with your team.
Another possibility in situations where it is possible, might be approaching your team and saying, "I've been ordered to lay off one person from this team. None of you deserve to be laid off. I want to discuss if there is anyone who has other opportunities available and how we can help that person land on their feet, and I want to be clear that I can be the one to go if that's the best option."
Of course, either of these decisions happens in a context that has to be considered. For example if you have kids who will legitimately go hungry if you don't lay people off and get fired, you have to balance your responsibility to your coworkers with your responsibility to your kids. There are no silver bullets.
This isn't about never making mistakes, it's about taking responsibility for your mistakes when (not if) you make them. If you really have no choice but to lay people off, then you can do it yourself, to their face, with a clear conscience.
People at the top of organizations make the decision to lay people off, but it's middle and lower management that delivers the news. That's not right, and it's part of a pattern in corporations of upper management taking the profits and credit from success, and taking none of the costs or blame for failure. If that's what you want to do, you can do it without me.
What I hear in this post is people taking orders of magnitude more credit for successes but whining when they're held equally responsible for failures.