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Can You Be Friends With Your Employees?

Name: Can You Be Friends With Your Employees?
Uploaded: 2025-07-26T20:00:18+00:00
Duration: 38 s
Channel: Shanli Liu, CPA, CTP
Description: In this brief monologue, the speaker reflects on their early career approach of treating all employees as friends, which led to blurred professional…

26 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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0:38

In this brief monologue, the speaker reflects on their early career approach of treating all employees as friends, which led to blurred professional boundaries, emotional spillover, and difficulty delivering performance feedback. They explain that they have since adopted a clear line between friendship and management by consciously switching ‘hats’—a ‘friend hat’ for informal, personal interactions and a ‘boss hat’ for corrective or managerial conversations. This hat‑changing technique serves as a practical tool to maintain both genuine rapport and effective leadership.

Chapters

Can you be friends with your employees? So when I started, I was friends with all my employees. Whatever the professional line was, I definitely didn't have it. I would show my emotions on my sleeves. If I was upset, they would be upset. I'd take my emotions out on them. When I needed them to change something, it was weird because we're friends. I'm like, hey man, can you, you know, like it just was, it sucked. I would say that where I'm at now in my career is that you can be friends with your employees as long as you maintain a clear line. And the easiest way that I have delineated this is literally doing a hat change. I'll start a conversation and be like, friend hat. And then I'll talk whatever I'm going to talk. And sometimes like, hey man, boss hat. Like this is, this is what's going wrong. Like you need to change this. So it's just maintaining that line.