No surprise, but your employees go home and talk about you with their friends and family. In fact, as their manager, you are likely a lively and ongoing topic, a subject filled with emotional highs and lows. I’ll bet they’re even talking about you right now.
As a leader, you represent (at least) three different faces to them:
- You as a person. Titles, roles, employment aside, how much to they like and respect you as another human being.
- You as their boss. Some people with like or dislike you just because you’re their boss. When you got promoted to manager your jokes automatically got funnier to some and some people automatically resented you just because you were in a position of authority.
- You as a representative of the company. You are the face of the company to your team and if the company does something unpopular some people will blame you regardless of how far you are removed from the decision.
This is why you can be a good person striving to be the best leader you can and still have people dislike you. That’s just some of the baggage that comes with the job.
