Opinion

Photo from Sachin H. Jain/LinkedIn

Jan 8, 2024, 15:18

Sachin Jain: One of the most challenging issues for early career leaders is maintaining healthy boundaries at work

Sachin Jain, President and CEO of Scan Group and Health Plan, shared on LinkedIn:

”One of the most challenging issues for early career leaders is maintaining healthy boundaries at work.

In a role I occupied more than a decade ago, I ran a team that was incredibly collegial at work and very social after work. We had lots of fun together.

Coming to work felt more like coming to see friends than it did coming to a workplace. It was great. Until it wasn’t.

My first 360 review running this team could be summarized as “we want a boss, not a friend.” I was a bit shocked by it—until I realized that people weren’t coming to work to be my friend. They were coming to work to do great work and to progress their careers.

The instinct of many (most) warm-blooded humans is to want to blur lines. Colleagues and direct reports become some blended hybrid of friend/colleague/compatriot. Which works wonderfully, of course, until some part of the implicit contract breaks down.

Once the genie is out of the bottle-it’s impossible to put back in. The friend/colleagues doesn’t meet your expectations or, worse, you fail to live up to the expectations they have of you. The perception of favoritism and preferential treatment begins to enter the workplace. The nature of your personal relationships gets in the way of your ability to deliver a hard message. Your hard message gets in the way of a personal relationship. Not defining relationships at work clearly can be lethal to team effectiveness—and performance. It can quickly devolve into an unmanageable mess. This doesn’t mean that people who work together can’t be friends. But it does require a careful attention by given to how the relationship is built early on.

Boundaries must be clearly defined and enforced. A deep and mutual understanding that work is work and everything else is everything else must be clear to all. It’s a difficult dance, but it’s a dance leaders best learn early in their careers. In the absence of clearly enforced boundaries—almost everyone suffers in the long run. Have you had a career experience that involved blurred boundaries? How did you navigate it?”

Source: Sachin Jain/LinkedIn