Legal
Issue No. 57 - February/March 2011
Draw a line between ‘friend’ and ‘boss’
by Grant Archer
If you hold a leadership position in your organisation you have to be attuned to the wellbeing of your staff. Leaders today are judged as much by their emotional intelligence as bottom lines.
The difficulty, however, is avoiding the dangerous ground where lines are blurred and the best of intentions come unstuck in the workplace. This happens when the ‘Boss-Friend line’ is crossed.
It is a given that office romances lead to all sorts of complications. This is a well-known trap for young and old. But as our work life encroaches further and further into our home life through technology such as PDAs and remote access, the line between what a leader may and may not manage becomes more difficult to define. Ironically, it has become far more important to make sure that line is defined!
A recent decision of the South Australian Workers Compensation Tribunal highlights this difficult issue.
In that case, an employee was diagnosed with depression attributed to a “pathological gambling disorder” in 2007. His work was suffering and he turned to his team leader. She allowed him an advance on his salary and agreed to monitor his personal spending.
Before long, the manager noticed the worker making suspic...
