Founders, don’t befriend your employees!
It can leave you without an important leverage
One of the most counter-intuitive things I’ve learned while building startups is that founders probably shouldn’t make friends with people working on them.
Most of us want to be good human beings. For founders that always means caring about people they work with. And that’s great if not necessary for building an outstanding team – people can not flourish until there’s an environment for that. But it’s too easy to get too far, to become too close to the team.
At first glance, there’s nothing bad in building close relationships but the reality is that this leads to serious hidden challenges.
The most important one is defined by psychology. For most people, especially talented ones, success is getting maximum social capital, respect from respected folks. The more respect from the more respected folks you get – the better.
The pitfall here is that once you got drunk with your employees, their need to get social capital from you drops, if not disappears. They can still respect you but once they’re allowed into the “inner circle”, your personal, intimate zone, they subconsciously discount social capital gained from you.
That leaves you without one of the most powerful motivating leverage.
Also, when your employees know too much about your personal life, they can’t but start looking into it to understand why you act this or that way. And this never leads to something beautiful because the focus should always be on customers.
As Tony Fadell in his “Build” writes, the best teams need a parent-like leader, the one who truly knows them and is respected by them, who gives them a push at the right time and helps them grow.
Talented people come to work not to find a soulmate. They come to build something they believe in and be led by someone who can help them thrive in it. So it’s wise of a founder to be such kind of a person even if it means not getting too close to the team.
Also have a look at some of my previous posts: