Executive Summary
Managing a direct report who is a relative of a senior executive can be daunting. You may never feel confident around them, despite your authority. Also, because everyone — from your boss to your peers to your team — has a reputational stake in how they relate to your direct report, you will get feedback from every direction on how you’re managing them. The author offers four strategies for managing the political sensitivities of everyone around you: 1) Commit to authentic conversations with your direct report. 2) Make subjective performance measures objective. 3) With critics, seek alignment, not approval. 4) Clarify roles to reduce perceptions of favoritism.
As a manager in a large organization, your success doesn’t just rely on your team’s results. It also depends on your boss and other senior executives’ evaluations of your leadership style. Your advancement potential is assessed, in part, by how you treat your direct reports. So, when senior leaders suggest being tougher with an underperforming employee or more supportive of someone with high potential, you take their feedback seriously. But what happens when one of your employees is related to a senior executive in your company?
Managers in family-owned companies traditionally defer to the owners for most business and leadership decisions without hesitation. But managers in non-family-owned companies who are working between a senior executive and a family member are expected to lead and influence while navigating a politically sensitive map of stakeholders. If this happens to you — and it’s likelier than ever, since over a third of employees today landed their job through referrals, most commonly through a family member — you may encounter dilemmas that go beyond common management challenges.
For instance, you may never feel confident around your direct report, despite your authority. A recent study showed that two in every three managers already find it uncomfortable to communicate with their employees, and over 30% of leaders worry about giving feedback to employees for fear of how they will respond. Imagine the additional discomfort when discussing the performance of a son, niece, or spouse of a C-suite leader in your company.
Further, when you become more insecure around one direct report, your team begins to notice that their boss isn’t treating everyone the same. If they suspect favoritism, morale can suffer. And because everyone — from your boss to your peers to your team — has a reputational stake in how they relate to your direct report, you will get feedback from every direction on how you’re managing them.
But by following these strategies, you can be an effective, confident boss while successfully managing the political sensitivities of everyone around you.
Commit to authentic conversations with your direct report.
In theory, your direct report’s familial relationships in the company shouldn’t affect how you work together. But it’s wise to assume it will have some impact even if everyone tries to ignore it.
The best way to understand what impact this working relationship has on your direct report is to reduce the emotional and mental distance between the two of you. You must be ready to be genuine about your concerns and invite your direct report to do the same, which starts with having an authentic conversation.
Colin (not his real name) was a senior director I coached, whose direct report was the daughter of an SVP at his company. He had a great relationship with his employee, but he shared with me, “Never a day goes by that I haven’t thought about what she is saying about me to her family.”
We suggested he arrange an informal lunch off-campus with his direct report to exchange thoughts and concerns about working together. After he shared his worries about how to manage his employee with confidence, he invited her to share her misgivings.
She reported that team members regularly “walked on eggshells” around her. It was apparent some colleagues resented her status, often withholding information she needed to do her job. At the same time, others tried to befriend her as a way of networking with her mother.
Colin told her, “Your family relationship shouldn’t matter at work, but if we ignore it, we minimize the struggle each of us might feel. My commitment to you is to be fair and transparent and make decisions based on merit, not family relationships. I ask that you be fair and honest with me as you work and advance in the organization so that we both assume each other’s best intentions.”
It wasn’t easy for Colin to tell someone junior to him that he worried about how to manage them. But he chose to be authentic and encouraged the same in his direct report. He knew that leading with authenticity keeps work engagement and performance high, not to mention personal well-being, which would ensure team effectiveness for the long term.
Take steps to address questions of fairness.
A recent study revealed 47% of employees believe their supervisor has favorites. When you have a direct report on your team that people deem as having advantages due to her family, the perception of having a favorite is hard to shed. Recognize her for a job well done, and your team may resent you; criticize her, and she may feel you are purposely harsh to prove you’re not biased.
To minimize unintended perceptions of unfairness, make subjective performance measures objective. When you develop criteria for success that is demonstrable and measurable by a broader set of stakeholders as opposed to the personal opinion of a few, you can assess and coach your team with impartiality.
I once coached a VP of corporate communications who was the daughter of a company board member. Most of the work the VP did with her team involved speechwriting and messaging for executives, so evaluating her direct report’s performance was always open to opinions on artistic style and tone. To provide more objective measures of performance, we suggested redefining the behaviors of a successful communications director in the company.
In the past, the department promoted directors who shared their boss’s writing style. But in a corporate setting, directors should be measured not just on taste, but on how well their messages simplify complex business issues for a diverse audience, follow standard marketing principles and adhere to a disciplined schedule of production.
The VP decided to set performance criteria for all her directors on behaviors that could be measured by user audiences rather than individual taste. She included behaviors like, “conveys technical issues in ways non-experts understand,” “writes in the voice and needs of the customer,” and “delivers final, edited version to executive on time.” In doing so, the VP reduced subjectivity when evaluating the direct report’s work and the rest of the team’s contribution.
In addition to clarifying performance criteria for your direct reports, you can reduce perceptions of favoritism by clearly delineating roles on your team. To avoid confusion about how you are dividing up work, and to remove any questions about each team member’s performance relative to the specific challenges of their job, keep role definitions crystal clear and consistent for each direct report.
When role ambiguity increases, employee creativity goes down, not to mention more possibilities for team members to resent each other and for morale to sink. To keep morale high, reinforce in team meetings your intentions around fairness. And make everyone’s job individually meaningful without blurring the boundaries between each other. Doing so will provide them a greater sense of ownership and equity in their work.
With critics, seek alignment, not approval.
Your colleagues, from your boss to your team members, may criticize how you work with your direct report based on their self-interest. You should communicate your intentions to align them with your perspective, but not necessarily seek their approval on every leadership action. Effective leaders listen to others’ concerns with respect and openness, but also have the courage to pursue a well-vetted course of action and communicate their decision, even if it upsets individual stakeholders.
One client whose direct report was the daughter of the company’s CFO regularly heard from his boss that he needed to be less blunt in his feedback because he was worried the CFO might hear about it. In truth, this boss was criticizing my client because he was worried about his reputation with the CFO.
Yet when we conducted a 360 assessment for my client, his employee reported that she deeply valued his direct coaching style because no one else was ever honest with her in the company.
To align with his boss while maintaining what he felt was the right way to manage his direct report, my client discussed the 360 results with each of them individually. He expressed a desire to integrate both of their perspectives into his approach. Ultimately, he assured his boss he would be more diplomatic while maintaining the honesty his direct report wanted.
Managing a direct report who is a relative of a senior executive can be daunting because it invites contradictory advice from all directions about your leadership approach. But by following these strategies, you can remove insecurities in others and yourself and continue to lead effectively.
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How to Manage Someone Who's Related to the Boss - Harvard Business Review
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