Losing Friends Gracefully As You Climb the Ladder

Are you employed in the corporate world, and get promoted to a higher position? Then you are supposed to gradually disengage from personal relations to your former peers, now your subordinates.

Continue at first to accept invitations to the homes of employee friends who now are your subordinates, but reciprocate only with group invitations. Then don’t accept at all.

Work out a set of logical excuses for not joining the group at lunch or coffee breaks. Give your friends in the office every chance to break away from you. They know you can’t remain part of the old gang.

Assuming you are a husband, allow your wife more time to pull away from friendships among those who are now your subordinates. She doesn’t understand office protocol as you do, needs to make the transition more slowly.

Break away gradually, but eventually reduce all contacts to office hours. Recognize the simple fact of office life that the higher you go, the fewer friends you’ll have in the company.

I guess you had some inkling of these things, but did you fully understand the brutal reality of this coded system?

So, is this brutal system useful? Well, it is supposed to be. For instance, in one place there was a manager who had two subordinate employees, who were sloppy and doing a bad job. They were also good friends of the manager.

Their sloppy work lost the company $40,000. The manager was told to crack down. He wouldn’t or couldn’t. So the two workers plus the manager got fired. He refused to learn where his job began and friendships ended.