A reader writes:
I have a small tight-knit team of eight people. The people that I’ve hired in the last two years socialize together quite a bit, which is great. The downside is they don’t invite me or the other managers; the junior members will hang out together and not invite the managers. The disappointing part of this is that this team has historically been very tight and (we hoped) didn’t feel hierarchical. As we hire more people, I would prefer that the environment feel inclusive. It’s a little awkward when five people spent their weekend together and are talking about it and the remaining three weren’t invited.
Recently at a team dinner one of them said to someone outside the department that “everyone went” to an event together. The person asked me if I had gone and I said, I hadn’t been invited. My team member said I wouldn’t have gone anyway.
The managers do have babies or life responsibilities that keep us from socializing together after hours. We also have more friends outside of work than most of the junior members so the likelihood of us participating is low. But we still would like to be asked and feel a little hurt to be left out while recognizing that the team should feel free to hang without being obligated to ask us to come. I guess they don’t want their supervisors to come along and that is tricky for us because we really encourage a “flat” culture and it’s put a small us vs. them vibe into the team.
I’m not exactly sure the best way to handle this or if there’s anything to handle at all.
Nope, there’s nothing to handle!
It’s very normal for people not to socialize with their managers. And in fact, that’s far preferable.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a manager occasionally grabbling drinks or dinner with their team! That’s fine. But managers should not typically be a regular presence in their teams’ after-hours socializing.
The reality is, flat culture or no, there are power dynamics in your relationships with the people you manage, and it’s not good for either side to blur those boundaries. You are still the person charged with assessing their work, giving them feedback, delivering bad news, evaluating them for raises and promotions, and potentially laying them off or firing them one day. You need to be able to do all of those things objectively, and — equally as important — you need people to believe that you’re doing all of those things objectively. That’s much harder to pull off when you’re regularly socializing with people who report to you (again, beyond the occasional drink or meal).
I know you’re not saying you necessarily would attend these social events; you just want to be asked. But that’s putting an inappropriate social expectation on your staff and ignoring the realities of your respective roles.
Frankly, it’s not necessarily great that your junior staff are all hanging out together this much either. There’s not really anything you can or should do about that, but be aware that it can sometimes cause problems of its own — like if one of them has a problem with her manager and the others decide to fight that as their own battle too, or if people develop group-think, or if they don’t like your next junior hire and she ends up feeling excluded, or if your next junior hire doesn’t want to hang out with coworkers this much but feels the culture expects her to, or if it just makes people feel like they can’t disconnect from work. It can also be a sign that you don’t have as much diversity on your team as you should — that you’re not, for example, hiring people who are older or who have kids or so forth.
But the immediate issue here is that you’ve got to reset your ideas about relationships with employees. You can and should have warm and friendly relationships with your employees, but you can’t ignore the power dynamics inherent in your roles. It’s not fair to expect them to treat you like peers or to be hurt if they don’t invite you to socialize.
Now, certainly if you see the group dynamics start to cause specific problems, that’s different. For example, if you felt that your junior employees were starting to act as a group when they should be acting as individuals — like filtering their ideas through each other and never suggesting anything without group approval, or spreading cynicism or toxicity — you’d need to address that. But you’d be addressing that specific manifestation, not the fact that they hang out together.
my team doesn’t ask managers to hang out with them was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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