Leadership - The Proper Relationship with Subordinates


By Mark Shead


In the army, “the men” are kept separated from “the officers.” This comes from the idea that the leaders should not be too close to the individuals they command. In the military this makes a lot of logical sense because if you are too close, you might have a difficult time making decisions that could result in harm to someone. On the army base they have an officers club, where the officers eat and socialize. On Sundays the facility is available to everyone, but there is a separate side for the officers and a separate side for the men. Side for the officers is generally a little fancier with better chairs and table arrangements.

A certain amount of separation that is prudent in non-military leadership as well. If you are overly friendly with your subordinates, it may be difficult for them to respect your authority. Many leaders end up at one extreme or the other. On the overly familiar side of things, they look to their subordinates to provide social interaction. Putting yourself in this type of situation can impede your judgment about an individual’s contribution or effectiveness within the organization. It is also detrimental because if all of your personal friends report to you, it is possible to end up with a bunch of sycophants instead of true honest friends who don’t fear they will endanger their job by telling you the truth.

On the other extreme side are the leaders who place themselves way above the people they direct. Somewhere in between these extremes is a healthy equilibrium. Part of your job as a leader is to identify and sense the proper poise that will give your subordinates the fulfillment of feeling like they have a relationship with you while keeping yourself in an authority position.

Leadership501 is a resources for leaders and people in management positions. Please visit http://www.leadership501.com to find out more about dealing with subordinates and other leadership and management topics.


More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Management Information:

Related Articles

Let the Professionals Help You Out - Outsource
As your website grows in terms of attracting more footfalls, generating more business, and providing more content; it will demand more time and attention from you to continue performing. As a businessperson, it is advisable that you concentrate on your core competency, which is the reason why you created the website in the first place.
Is Your Business Healthy?
Most business owners I work with want to grow their businesses. I guess this probably applies to most businesses in general.
Dividing The Loot
It is when the going gets better, that the going gets tough. This enigmatic sentence bears explanation: when a firm is in dire straits, in the throes of a crisis, or is a loss maker - conflicts between the shareholders (partners) are rare.
Employee Performance - If You Want the Best, Get Personal!
This is a story about a man and three dogs.I walk a lot - usually for about half to three-quarters of an hour most mornings.
Employee Turnover: Is It Eating Up Your Profits?
Keeping the cost of doing business down, yet providing a quality product or service, is one of the most critical components of success for today's leader. What many fail to realize is that employee turnover can represent a very substantial price tag to a company's productivity and its bottom line.
Factoring Financing: How to Grow Your Business Without Debt or Loans
What is factoring?Accounts receivable financing, also known as factoring, is a powerful financial tool that has fueled the growth and success of a number of companies. Factoring enables companies to capitalize on their unpaid receivables by selling them to a factoring company for immediate payment.
A Leadership Screw Driver: The 90 Day Improvement Plan
I was talking with first-line supervisors in a utility company about how to deal with poor performing employees."You've gotta put the screws to him!" suggested one supervisor to his colleague who was having trouble managing one particular poor performer.
Is Your Management Style Assisting or Hurting Your Business?
Many times business owners can have significant differences in management styles that can deter the growth of both the employees and the business.Employees can have differing needs that require differing methods of management as well.
Todays Employees and Their New Needs: What You Need to Know
Today's employees are not only interested in security or in pay and fringe benefits. They are often placing increased value on being recognized and involved in reaching personal growth goals.
3 Simple Things the Best Managers Do - And You Can Too!
If it's so simple, why don't managers all over the globe get this right, every time? Well, because it's so simple, it seems too easy, so busy managers squeeze a lot more in, time after time. And that makes things much more complex - just the way a manager should be.
Knowledge Management - Capturing And Structuring Knowledge Into Reusable Assets
Many organizations have an approach for identifying and recording lessons learned, perhaps as part of a post-project review or similar process. Unfortunately, lessons learned reports have a tendency to end up on a shelf gathering dust, or lost in the un-chartered corner of a fileserver somewhere.
Are you NICE or do you CARE?
Are you NICE or do you CARE?Most people and most managers want to be nice. After all, it's easier to be nice than to not be nice.
When Code Freeze Turns To Code Slush
Time To Market (TTM) is a vital concept that every executive understands. Releasing a product to market before your competition gives you a significant first-mover advantage.
Creativity and Innovation Management: The Creative State
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.There are other useful definitions in this field, for example, creativity can be defined as consisting of a number of ideas, a number of diverse ideas and a number of novel ideas.
ISO 9001 and Total Quality Management
Total Quality ManagementTotal Quality Management, or TQM, has become one of the most frequently discussed topics in current business literature. Because of the competitive pressures created by Japanese companies, quality became a competitive weapon in the 1980s in most industries.
Qualities of a Great Manager
In the call center environment we are often only as successful as the people we hire. While our front line employees are critical to our business, choosing the right managers powerfully impact your success.
Managing People - No One Shows You What To Do
Imagine the following scenario - you pay a visit to yourdoctor one day and in the course of the conversation he orshe lets it slip that they have no formal medicalqualification. However, everything's okay because they'vebeen involved in the "doctoring" business for years, hadlots of experience and have read several books on thesubject; I bet you'd be out of there like a shot.
Managing Client Relationships
Managing Client Relationships: Even the best run organizations occasionally run into difficult situations with clients, consultants, and vendors. Often times it is not just a business process that has gone a-rye, it is the relationship of the people managing the situation.
Collaboration: 3 Keys to Keeping Your Documents from Getting Lost in the Shuffle
Often, collaborating documents in a team or in a business can feel like a complex sports play gone wrong. The ball gets passed off to the wrong person, dropped, or even lost.
The Top 10 Things They Don't Teach You In Business School
Here are 10 subjects that academia should be teaching their students in business school:1. Generate revenue for your companyWhat academia doesn't teach you is that the real purpose organizations hire you is to generate revenue.