A man has sparked a discussion online after sharing why he believes managers should avoid becoming too friendly with people they supervise.
Drawing from his own experience of leading a team, he said that failing to maintain professional boundaries eventually left him feeling that his flexibility had been misused.
“Never ever be a cool boss. I repeat, never ever be a cool boss. So, I don’t know how many of you will relate to this, but this is from one of my past experiences. He explained that his approach was to avoid making junior colleagues feel that he was above them.
I was working with a company, I was managing few people, and it is my behavior, or I would say it is my habit, that I don’t like to make people feel like I am superior to them – like people who are around me or the people to whom I am superior, to whom I am managing,” Wadhwani said. However, he said his experience eventually changed his perspective on how managers should interact with their teams.
Sharing his advice for other managers, Wadhwani continued, “I gave a lot of leverage to all my team, all the people who were junior to me, but this is one of my advice from all this experience: that it’s always better to maintain a line between and to make your boundaries very clear. One user wrote, “Boundaries are important at work. A third person disagreed with the broader idea, commenting, “Being kind is not the problem.
Another said, “Respect matters more than being ‘cool’. Another viewer found the experience familiar and wrote, “This is actually very relatable.”
