Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep95: Being friends with your boss. A good idea?

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Career Online Offline Podcast. This is Mei Ping. Today, I have a very interesting topic that I want to talk about

and I'm sure every single person listening to today's episode can really resonate. The question is this, should you be friends with your boss? And by boss, I mean your direct manager, your line manager, your reporting manager, basically that person that fills up that performance review at the end of the year for you. So should you be friends with your boss? So this was a question that popped up quite recently. One of my clients was, well, not was, she has been working for about six months now and she recently moved to a new company.

And in this new company, she feels the pressure to be friends with her boss. So she asked me this question, oh, Mei Ping, what do you think? Do you think I should be friends with my boss? I feel slightly uncomfortable, but should I do it? Because I'm being told that this is really important for my career advancement.

So it's a really good question. And I think I want to also share another story of another similar, a client in a similar situation where her boss was a good friend. I guess when she joined the company, she was reporting to another manager, but due to internal restructuring, her good friend eventually became her boss. So that was a very complicated situation because she found herself unable to tell apart

the working relationship versus the friendship, which is obviously really tricky. So then begs the question of how friendly is friendly and do we even need to be friends with our boss and our colleagues to advance in our career? So over the years I've spent in the corporate world, I have seen both sides of the story. I have seen friends, colleagues turned friends, who were able to sort everything out. They were extremely productive, no impact on their working relationship whatsoever. However, I have also seen situations where

because the boss and the staff are friends, in some instances, the employee, the staff, maybe that person is you, may feel under pressure to go the extra mile. And not just one time, but every single time to go the extra mile to help a friend. So that can be a very tricky situation. And for some instances that I've heard, the relationship could turn toxic. And maybe at the end of the day, you might even lose this friend, right?

So what then is the better way? Is it worth it to be friends for career progression? Or is it enough to just be friendly as long as you can get your job well done? So personally for me, the approach that I took for many years in the corporate world is to be friendly and professional, but to draw the line between personal friends and very, very friendly and supportive colleagues. So the line might sound very grey, but there is a big difference,

at least from a mental and emotional point of view, why these are exactly not the same things because at the end of the day like when you work in a nine-to-five job you work in a company your number one priority is to deliver your your performance goals right to support the company's goals that is the number one priority and every single person that's hired, me, you, somebody else, we have very clear KPIs, objectives, and goals that you need to deliver. Friendship can happen outside the 9 to 5 for sure. Don't get me wrong.

I'm all for friends that you make from the workplace. And I'm sure there are many long-lasting friendships as well. But if you're not cautious of the potential impact, when something blows up, it may not be so easy to get out of the situation, if you get what I mean. And that is something that could be very tricky. And eventually, if you fall in that situation,

it might come to an unfortunate situation where you may need to let go of that friendship, which then defeats the entire purpose of wanting to work with your friend. So I think my advice here is be friendly, but always remember that your performance goals, like your work objectives comes first because that's what you have signed up for when you join the company, when you join the team, when you choose to work with a boss. I think that is the number one priority that you need to think about.

And of course, course right outside of that if we all could get along you know different different things of course for sure right outside of working hours definitely but i think never never see these two things as the same thing because i think the repercussions could be a big one. And the worst deal, it could be things that you cannot get out from, which is also very tricky. So now, the next question I always tend to get asked is, okay, but maybe when you say friendly, what does friendly mean?

Friendly means that we have to go for dinner all the time, or I need to buy coffee for my boss. What does friendly actually mean so um friendly obviously you know it's it depends on like your communication style it depends on your networking style but i think it's really that mentality is really that mindset that matters the most so when you are in a conversation with your boss, when you are making jokes, when you are networking, chit-chatting, always remember that, hey, this person is my boss. I think that is the best frame of mind that I can share with you if you want to be able to draw the distinction. Because it is almost impossible to name like the 10 000 scenarios that could

potentially happen on like you know what's friendly and what's not friendly but i think that should be the frame of mind that you apply when like i said you're having a conversation you're having a chit chat you're networking or whatever that should be the frame of mind that you're applying um before deciding if like how much is too much, right? How does this affect your work? How does it affect your objectives? How does it affect your performance goals? And make sure that the line is there.

So that's why friends versus friendly, it sounds very similar, but it's not exactly the same thing. And of course, if you choose to leave the company after that, obviously, you can become friends. And personally, for me, I'm also in touch with a lot of my ex-bosses and we check in with each other from time to time. And that's when, okay, yeah, maybe I learn a little bit more personal about their life and their family and all those things. But when I was in the role, the conversations like 80, 90% of the time is strictly focused on the task at hand, the objective, the projects, the engagements and so forth. Because I think once you muddle everything together,

then like I said, you might fall in a situation where it gets tricky to say no to a friend. And I'm sure you all can resonate. Like, when was the last time you had to say no to a good friend? I'm sure it felt really uncomfortable. And you don't want to have this sort of emotional barrier when you are working on very important priorities and really focusing on your goals. And now you want to cater cater to different different dimensions of that relationship with your boss and yeah basically i have yeah i have seen many situations of such

such um relationships not work out so just some food for thought um i'm not saying like it's a yes or a no but just some food for thought For those of you who are extremely friendly, those of you who could really get along very well, I think just make sure that it doesn't impact your work. And if everything is clear, the boundaries are set, then they shouldn't have a problem. So with that, I will leave you all with a question to ponder on whether you are, whether you would consider your boss a friend or you feel that, you know, the current friendly attitude that you have towards your boss is good enough. So with that, I will see you in the next episode. Bye!