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The Difference Between
Boss and Friend
Office culture can make or break a business. Here’s how to find—and set—the personal boundaries
that work best for your operation. b y A D A M B O R N S T E I N
1/ Success starts with
respecting our clients
above all else.
2/ Don’t be an a-hole.
3/ Show your family
(the team) you care about
them and their success.
4/ Overcommunicate—
but keep it to work channels
and work-appropriate.
5/ Respect the boundaries
set by your family.
Having a close team is important to me,
but where’s the line between having a
healthy culture and getting too personal?
—BJ, KANSAS CITY, MO.
A FEW YEARS AGO, I saw the
answer to this question play
out in front of me. It was at
one of our two12 events, where
we’d assembled a panel of
entrepreneurs to talk about
work culture. Half of the featured entrepreneurs said they
only hire their friends. The
other half said they never want
friendship to be the backbone
of their business. And that
pretty much sums it up: There
is no right answer here.
However, I can offer a good
way to think about it.
When you consider how to
relate with your team, you’re
really considering company
culture. Some see culture as a
by-product of competitive salaries, good benefits, and flexible
working hours; others feel it’s
about camaraderie, friendship,
and retreats. As the founder,
you have the ability to set
the terms of your culture—
including how everyone relates
to each other.
To do this, I’ve found it helpful to first create values for your
company. At our business Pen
Name Consulting, we wrote
these guidelines:
32 / E N T R E P R E N E U R . C O M / January-February 2019
While that language might
not be your speed, the vibe
should be clear: We want Pen
Name to have a client-centered
focus, and that means showing
mutual respect, appreciation,
and communication to everyone within our organization
and outside of it.
That last value on the list—
respecting boundaries—speaks
to the question of whether
colleagues are also friends.
It should be given extra care.
Early in my career, long before
we wrote that list of values, I
didn’t do a good job of this. The
friendships I developed with
my team made it difficult to
know when we could act like
friends and when we needed to
act like coworkers. It made it
hard to establish a hierarchy of
decision-making, and it made
it difficult for new employees to
feel comfortable. (Friendships
are good; cliques are toxic.)
In one instance, an employee
wasn’t doing his job, but the rest
of the team was afraid to tell me
because he had become a close
friend of mine. The problems ran
deep, and the employee needed
to be fired, but it took me a
while to become aware of this—
because of the culture I had
created. It was my fault, and
building boundaries was a big
part of the eventual solution.
By establishing clear guidelines and expectations, we made
it easier for our team to understand what behavior was appropriate. We started measuring
our own success by the success
of our clients, which empowered our employees to take action
and speak up if a team member
wasn’t pulling his weight. A sense
of mutual respect—not personal
friendships—became the driving
force in our workplace culture,
and it helped us do better (and
more) work.
In the end, your business
belongs to you. Whether or not
you want to be friends with your
employees inside or outside the
office won’t determine success
or failure—there are simply too
many examples that prove both
approaches can work. But you
want to make sure your values are
clear and pave the way for healthy
communication. It will keep your
employees feeling comfortable, and
it will enable them—as a team—to
do the best work possible.
Adam Bornstein is the founder
of Pen Name Consulting,
a marketing and branding
agency, and the creator of
two12, a mentorship experience
for entrepreneurs.
Illustration / F E D E R I C O G A S TA L D I
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