When Your Buddy Becomes Your Boss

I spent much of my early adult years working the graveyard shift in a grocery store to work my way through University.  I’m not really sure why any thinking employer would leave four or five twenty-year-olds unattended in the middle of the night with several hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory, but they did.  It’s a good thing we didn’t sell booze.

There was a camaraderie on the Night Crew that comes when a group of like-minded individuals works closely together.  All was fine until one of the guys figured out he was in charge.  I suspect the store manager worked night crew once himself, and knew it was a debacle, and figured out how to solve the problem:  make someone accountable.

This was fine, except that because he was accountable, he, in turn, wanted all of us to be accountable.  I didn’t want to be accountable, I wanted to be at home, in my bed, asleep.  This guy took us to task on the length of our breaks, and how many bananas we consumed in the middle of the night without ringing them through the register.

In short, he did exactly what he should have, as our boss.  The problem was, this guy was our buddy a short time ago, and all of sudden he was the boss.  What happened to all those drunken stoopers where we’d backstab the management bozos?  Now he was one of those management bozos.

In some cases, when two highly-professional people decide to make it work, a new boss and his/her former peers can make it work.  Most of the time, however, you have to choose between being a buddy or being a boss.

If you are doing your job well as a manager, you’re not there to make friends.  You’re there to do your job to the best of your ability, which occasionally may mean pissing off former peers.

The bottom line is if your friendships at work are really important to you, you may want to think long and hard about how badly you want that promotion to becoming the boss.