WHY EVERY LEADER NEEDS FRIENDS. By Raymond Aisabor.
As leaders, we all want to be competent and successful.
The problem is that our quest for success can be demanding.
It can feel lonely at the top.
Yet, you can’t afford to be isolated. You deserve a rich, full life—including a social life. Every leader can thrive by cultivating friendships, protecting time for friendship, and enjoying leisure time with friends.
A lack of close relationships can be a real problem for leaders. Every leader needs friends, and today we’re going to talk about why that’s true.
I found, it’s sometimes hard for a leader to have real friends.
Do you really need friends to be an effective leader? Yes you do.
We all know a lot of people and interact with people all the time, and that’s typical for leaders. We’re having coffee with people or lunch on a regular basis, but we’re not necessarily sharing our lives in a way that allows other people to have insight, to support us, to encourage us, to challenge us, because we’re in a position of leadership.
As leaders in position of authority you are very busy, you don’t have a lot of time for outside friendships, and particularly if they don’t have any boundaries on their life -their evenings are taken up with work, same is weekends consumed with work, there’s no margin to pursue anything but work. It’s a world of total work.
The second reason is because they feel like they can’t be vulnerable. In other words, they have to be unassailable all the time, somebody who is as near to perfect as can be, and they want to represent that image. So if they were to let down their hair or let down their guard, people would disrespect them.
It’s a complete myth.
It’s totally the opposite of that. The more vulnerable you can be as a leader the more honest you are. One of the things you’ll find out is that everybody can relate to you more (for more on vulnerability in leadership read my past FB post).
4 reasons every leader needs friends.
• The first reason is friends keep you healthy.
The truth is been in leadership isolation at the top can be very dangerous. Left to our own devices, left to our own thinking, we can get paranoid, we can get our perspective distorted, we can lose our sense of self-awareness, and one of the things friends do is bolster all of that. They help us to be more self-aware, because when we say something that’s a faux pas or something that’s inappropriate, a friend can be there to correct us or call our attention to it, to correct our perspective.
Further bond and healthy leadership can thrive when friends travel together. There’s something about having that shared experience that you create memories together, which is huge. Attending important days together, weddings, graduations, births of kids, those kinds of things, just showing up for each other. Going on walks together or getting outside together. If you combine movement of some kind that you really enjoy with someone you really enjoy, that can be great in your leadership.
Worshiping together can also be great. I think, just having people in your home and going to the homes of your friends… That is one of those things people do less and less nowadays. It’s crazy. There’s something so intimate, and there’s so much connection, and you learn so much about someone by being in their own space. Just having people over for dinner, even if you bring in food from outside, I think is a great thing to do together every once in a while as leaders.
•The second reason is friends make you more effective leader.
This is true because friends often challenge your thinking, especially if you have good diversity in your friendships, diversity of age, background and opinion and all those things. They probably see life a little differently than you do, and that’s not only healthy for you, but it makes you more effective as a leader, because you need to consider different perspectives. You need to have well thought-out opinions, and good friends can help you do that. I also think they help you increase your creativity. Speaking of leadership, we have to also look at effectiveness for the long term, not just in the short term. If I decide i will stay focused on my work without friends as a leader, I can be highly effective, highly efficient, but not for long. It’s not sustainable. I think that’s one of the values friendships bring to a leader is that they make there lives more sustainable.
• The third reason every leader needs friends is friends keep you from being a Jerk . Can anybody relate to that?
I would hate to think how insufferable a leader would be left to my own devices and antics. The truth is leaders needs genuine friend who can be one of the great correctives in there inner circle especially when they guff, friends call there attention to it and correct them without massaging there egos. There are things a leader can say in a place yet unaware of a misspeak which they may not mean in an offensive or inappropriate way, having friends around who are looking at it from the outside in will call a leaders attention to it.
That’s great benefit to a leader.
Your friends are not that impressed with your status, necessarily.
Next, If you’re in a public role of leadership always have it at the back of your mind that your friends are not your fans. They’re not your followers on social media. These are people who hopefully are seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly of your life that is unfiltered, and they have things they too are challenged with privately and are pursuing. So; they’re not really that impressed with you, when there is need to correct you and that’s again so healthy to have as leaders.
Your big win, new appointment or promotion in leadership that your fans or followers might really care about is not nearly as important as the fact that someone in your life is struggling with an illness or one of your kids is having a hard time or you were recently bereaved of a close family. Those are the things your friends care about. Certainly, they celebrate with you. I’m not saying that’s not a part of it, but it’s much more complicated than that when you are leader , and these action from close friends remind you there’s more to life than your successes or failures, so you don’t get too full of yourself or too self-absorbed.
The question is; As leaders how do you invite people or give them permission to offer criticism or to challenge your thinking? close friends will call you out without an invitation? it’s all depend on the nature of your friendship with them.
You can decide to shut down such access to friends and go official protocol on your friends and be defensive, well if you do that you lose one of the most important inputs in your life as a leader, and it’ll drive you further into isolation.
Take a look at some local and international public figures (we won’t mention any names here), but certain international leaders we know are incredibly offensive whenever they make public statement on issues be it foreign or domestic.
You just think, “What a jerk. Doesn’t he have any friends? Doesn’t she have any friends?” Is nobody speaking the truth to them?
That is really because they’ve cut themselves off from friendship.
If you have real friends in your life as a leader, it’s not a danger for them to call you up every now and then over a misstep or official guff no matter the caliber of experts opinion available to you before making that decision or public statement, unless of course all of your friends are jerks.
The point I was getting at is, if you get defensive and shut friends out of leadership, what will happen, particularly if you’re a leader in a political position or an organization or you have social status above your friends who aren’t in your new class, is that people will start packaging the information you get. They’ll quickly learn, even subconsciously, what topics are safe and what topics aren’t safe for your listening ears and attention; this way, you get cut of from seeing the mess or feeling the purse and heartbeats of the people who you truly lead.
That’s not leadership.
This unfortunately has been the case with leadership at the very top in most nation.
The next question is: Do some leaders surround themselves with yes-friends or yes-men?. Yes they do.
How do this happens to leaders?
You see, if you have a public position/celebrity presence this naturally attracts people who are really just fans, who would like to be your friend but aren’t on an equal footing with you in some way because of your present status… They start out as fans sort of role and then warm there way into becoming your yes-friend more of yes-man. That’s a danger leaders must avoid, such friends may be hesitant to be honest with you, but if you’re talking about friendship as leader these consist of those who you’re walking through your regular life with, if they’re real friends they’re not going to be yes-friends.
A Leaders friends are distinct from friends on social media make no mistake about that.
• The fourth reason is that friends look out for you.
It’s neat when you care about somebody who is your friend and you look out for their interest, what’s best to further there leadership mission with nothing in it for you and there’s also some kind of professional overlap or at least something relevant in both of your life.
So often, our best contacts, our best opportunities for leadership ascension come through friendships, somebody introducing you to somebody else higher up, somebody giving you an idea for a project, and you doing the same thing. Very often, as friends, we know the answer to somebody’s problem. It’s just one friend away to solve it, and it’s fun to see that happen to a leader.
As leaders, do not confuse networking and what you can get out of that and real friendship. There is a huge difference. Networking it’s all about “How can I help you and you help me?” It’s kind of transactional in that way, but in leaders friendship, it’s like you have somebody who’s your advocate, who’s for you, who wants to see you win, somebody you can celebrate your wins with, someone always looking for opportunities they can connect you with. Another interesting thing is having a friend who can defend you against your critics. That’s a great friendship to have and nurture as leaders even at the top.
it’s important to remember, that “friends looking out for you” is a reason to have friends as leaders; it’s also a real indicator of what makes a friend. If you have a friend who’s not willing to do that, they may not really be a friend to you after all.
A marker for that is somebody who will hold what you share with them in strict confidence. The people who are my very best friends are people I can talk to like they were a priest. I know it’s not going to go anywhere else. I know they’re going to be fiercely loyal to me, that if they have something to criticize in me they’re going to come to me privately, and not throw out there in public domain what you’ve discussed in private, that they’re not going to gossip behind my back. If somebody does that, they’re automatically not going to be a friend of a leader, who shouldn’t be allowed in your inner circle.
By the way, this is one of the reasons leaders have fewer friends than they really need, because so much of what they need to share in a friendship is confidential or could be compromising or ruinous in some way if other people found out publicly or in their company. I think that’s really prohibitive for people. Trust is huge. You have to have people you know you can trust and who you’re able to share the things that are truly confidential with and know they’re not going to go anywhere, whether that’s personally or official.
Here’s where you have to be very careful, though, and If you ever have a betrayal, it’s easy for that to sort of led into a limiting belief. We’ve seen this happen with leaders, where they had somebody who they trust as a friend betray their trust, so now they’ve come to the conclusion that they can’t have friends outside of there tribe or clan. Such leaders have gone from that isolated experience at the top of their leadership to a self limiting belief that no one can be trusted.
That again is not leadership.
One way leaders could checkmate such betrayals is to have few friends, but more importantly is to have depth of friendship they have by intentionally compartmentalizing friends into * best friends,
- close friends,
- acquaintances,
*. followers,
*. friends or fans on social media with whom they’ve had no interaction outside of social media but no a thing or two about such friends.
What the above can help a leader do is know how to prioritize the level of trust and confidence.
So, we’ve talked about the reasons every leader needs friends. Many leaders may have realize reading this article: “Hey, I really don’t have close friends.
How do I fix that?”