As I’ve mentioned in pervious blog posts, I run a sustainability education program that is funded through Penn State Housing. We work to educate campus residents about how to live sustainably on campus and in the dorms. We focus on teaching proper recycling, electricity conservation, and reducing water use. However, some other topics we’ve done work on have been easy plant-based meal recipes, responsible consumerism, and sustainable swaps for everyday items. I’m in charge of a general body of about 60 students and about 8 leadership team members that I hire and manage. This leadership team is responsible for coordinating, planning, and running our events and outreach programs while I work on administrative work. These 8 leadership team members work closely with me to manage the program’s success and evaluate our work. Over the years, I have become very close with the members of this program and I’m friends with many of them. One person in particular is one of my best friends and we hang out frequently outside of work. Everything was running smoothly until they became a problem within the program.
My friend is in charge of recruitment, a very important part of our program. Our program depends on his recruitment committee because if he doesn’t recruit enough people to apply, we won’t have enough people to work in the program next year. He had been telling us that his committee had been moving forward with recruiting from first-year seminars. We were under the impression that he would present at multiple seminars and we would get plenty applicants. When it got later in the semester we were wondering how many seminars he had booked and why he hadn’t gone to any yet. He asked him at one of our meetings how many he had booked and he let it slip that he hadn’t even emailed the professors to ask to come and present yet. By this time, we needed to be wrapping up recruitment, so we were disappointed and confused why he hadn’t made any steps to complete this project he had been telling us about for months. We felt deceived because we had been under the impression that he had been moving forward based on what he told us.
We set up an individual meeting soon after we realized he had not been moving forward with his role. We made our expectations clear in the beginning of the semester and we restated these in the meeting. We told him we were disappointed because we really had faith in his ability to move forward with recruitment project. We tried to balance both “concern for production” and “concern for people” in our meeting (Hamel). Although recruitment is an important part of our program, my friend is an important person in this program as well. We thought maybe there was an underlying reason he had not been honest with us earlier. He ended up breaking down and becoming very emotional. He had been struggling with lots of academic stress and mental health issues, but felt he needed to put on the façade that he was getting everything done. We ended up talking about how he could delegate more to his team and how I could take over some portion of his project. We used aspects of Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid, specifically “team management” in which we emphasized both the achievement of goals we set and also the wellbeing of our team and their individuality (Northouse, 2019). I think that my willingness to take on parts of his role that he couldn’t handle in the moment assigns my leadership style to this aspect of team management because I took his individual needs into account and was willing to compromise and take on some work myself (Northouse, 2019). Additionally, I used my own experiences and knowledge about delegation to help mitigate the challenges he was dealing with.
Similarly, the Ohio State Studies on Leadership Behavior showed that taking both consideration and initiating structure resulted in positive leadership style (Hamel). The concepts were not opposite sides of a spectrum, a leader needs to embody both to be effective. The expectations we set for my friend initiated structure and we restated these expectations and how he was not meeting them in our meeting. At the same time, we told him we knew he was capable of much more than what he was producing, and if he needed help he needed to be honest with us. This was incredibly effective and we both maintained our goals for our program and our friendship with him. I’m so happy we were able to work together and I was able to be firm yet caring. I’m still very close friends with him and it is because of the duality of my leadership style.
References:
Hamel, R. (n.d.). Lesson 5: Style and Situational Approaches. Reading.
Northouse, P.G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Hey Amanda,
thanks for sharing this. I interviewed a local small business owner last semester and she gave me some golden advice on working with friends. She said that there should be boundaries between work and friends. As an entrepreneur, this was really important to me. I come up with a lot of ideas with my closest friends, but I must remind myself and them that I wouldn’t be a good boss/manager to them. I’m glad you were able to figure it out though!