Essential Leadership Skills

Hi Jayden – Thanks for your question.

What to do when managing friends and former peers

You don’t mention specifically what your challenges are in managing your friends. Nevertheless, we have a good idea what they are likely to be, because this topic comes up all the time in our management courses. Research also confirms that most people getting promoted into a leadership position cite the transition from friend to boss as the biggest hurdle in their new role.

Leadership that balances relationships and authority
What many participants of our management training tend to find difficult, is to strike the right balance between maintaining their friendships but also give constructive feedback and delegate tasks (‘tell ‘m what to do’). Is that your challenge, too?
It makes sense; you have good relationships and don’t want to ruin those by saying things that make them like you less, right? You don’t want to come across as suddenly ‘bossing around’ everyone.
Well, here is the good news; you can remain friends and be the ‘boss’. You just need to keep a few things in mind.

Show strength
Establish yourself firmly as the manager. Create a ‘vision’ for the team. Set goals and priorities. You may need to explain to your friends about your responsibilities. Set some guidelines about how you expect your relationship to work. Real friends will understand and respect your new situation.

Show fairness
Make sure you don’t show any favouritism towards your friends. Sometimes this can show in time you spend with them, opportunities for projects or promotions you allocate, resources or financial rewards. Treat everyone in the team the same, whether friends or not.

Show humility
Stay with both feet firmly on the ground. Be professional, but not arrogant. Listen to your team and pay everyone due respect. Your new title and having completed a supervisor course doesn’t automatically entitle you to admiration. Make sure you earn your respect.

If you want to know more, why not sign up for our Essential Leaderships Skills course? We’ll go into more depth on managing the transition from friend or former peer to manager.

If there are a few colleagues who are also in the same situation, ask us how we will tailor a powerful in-house management training program. We can go deeper into this issue and the many other challenges you face as a new supervisor or manager.

Here’s what questions to ask when you conduct a job interview

Hi Samantha
Thanks for your question. It’s a big one. We often dedicate one or even two days to deliver a management course about the art of recruiting and selecting.

In our public management course we unfortunately don’t have much time to dedicate to recruiting. However, when we deliver in-house management training we tailor the program to the needs of the client and group, so it’s easier to focus on important management course topics such as recruitment and selection.

Nevertheless, we can give you some good quick tips:

Have a clear Job Description
Make sure you know what kind of person you want to recruit. Are you perfectly clear on:
 What tasks and duties they need to perform?
 What will their responsibilities be?
 What skills do they need to have?
 What kind of attitude are you looking for?
 When does someone have the right cultural fit for your team and the organisation?
Often these things are described in a Position (or Job) Description.

Ask behavioural interview questions
When you know what kinds of things you’re looking for, then you can start putting together questions that recruit for those skills and characteristics. From research we know that if you ask hypothetical questions, you can get ‘wishful’ answers. That is, answers that the interviewee thinks you want to hear. For instance, ‘What would you do if…….’

It turns out it’s much harder to ‘fake’ behavioural questions, so you’ll get much closer to the truth. Behavioural interview questions ask for a specific example of a behaviour in the past by your candidate (not by a team or ‘we’). Often these interview questions start with ‘Give me an example of….’, or ‘Tell me about a time….’

An example is when you’re looking for teamwork qualities of a candidate, you could ask, ‘Tell me about an occasion where you had to collaborate with a colleague to accomplish something and things didn’t go well. What happened? What did you do? What was the result?’
Behavioural questions are difficult for any candidate, so be prepared to be flexible and ask it in a slightly different way.

Oh, and don’t forget to probe: don’t take the answer immediately and move on. Go further to explore their contribution and, importantly, the results. If they were able to achieve great outcomes in similar circumstances as your job, they may be able to do the same for you.

I trust that gives you a good start. Good luck. Let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Peter Munnik