Getting promoted is great. But having to manage your former peers? Not always so fun.

Over at The Insightful Leader podcast, Harry Kraemer had some advice for how to navigate that sticky situation.

If you don’t already know Kraemer, you’re in for a treat: He was chairman and CEO of a multibillion-dollar healthcare company, Baxter International. He’s on a lot of different boards; he’s a favorite professor here at Kellogg, where he teaches management; and, most importantly, he is willing and able to answer any question that we at Kellogg Insight ask about leading people.

So as part of our occasional “Ask Insight” podcast series, we peppered him with some listener questions, as well as a few of our own. You can listen to Part 1 of that episode here; Part 2 is on its way. (Want to make sure you don’t miss it? Subscribe! We’re on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Overcast.)

Set expectations, early and often

OK, back to the quandary at hand. Kraemer says you don’t necessarily have to end the personal relationship—as long as you trust yourself to play both parts, friend and boss, fairly. Ultimately, it’s a decision that requires self-reflection; he suggests asking yourself the question, “Do I feel that I can explain to folks that now I’m the boss and I’m going to be holding them accountable?”

If you do decide to maintain the friendship, Kraemer recommends setting expectations early. He’s even got a little script to try: “I’ll say, ‘we can still be friends, but I just want to remind you, I do have to now hold you accountable,’” he says. “So when I say, ‘geez, this project, this is due at five o’clock,’ if in your mind, you say, ‘well, it’s Harry, we’re friends. I can turn it in at 10,’ that’s going to be a problem.”

Setting clear expectations can prevent other common workplace challenges, too. For example, if you’ve got an employee who seems to be taking advantage of your trust (say, running lots of errands on company time), the real problem may be that you, as a leader, didn’t make the rules of the road explicit enough.

So when you learn that a team member has been grocery shopping on the clock, don’t immediately assume their intentions were bad. Instead, you can start with a quick conversation about what kinds of schedule flexibility you’re OK with—and what kinds you aren’t.

“I love to give people the benefit of the doubt,” Kraemer explains. “I’m going to assume that I didn’t make it clear. I’m going to assume that maybe that wasn’t obvious. … But now here’s the key thing for me, after I’ve now made it clear, after I’ve set a clear expectation, after we’ve communicated, if it happens again, then I’m going to view this as a breakdown in trust. And as you well know, when you lose the trust, bad things happen.”

To Kraemer, the best management emerges from a simple formula—set expectations, communicate, and hold people accountable. When people understand what you want them to do, why you want them to do it, and the consequences of not following through, “it solves so many problems, so much frustration that goes on in life.”

You can listen to the whole episode and the rest of Kraemer’s advice here.

Got any other burning leadership questions for Kellogg faculty? Send them our way at insight@kellogg.northwestern.edu.

Talking point

The Electoral College gets a lot of criticism, particularly for the disproportionate weighting of small and swing states. But in a new paper, Kellogg’s Georgy Egorov outlines one important and underdiscussed upside of the Electoral College: it reduces both the incentives to commit election fraud and the likelihood of pulling it off. That’s because under this system, states where fraud would be the most useful (i.e., the swing states) are the same ones where it would be least feasible, in that they tend to have a stronger opposition party, making it more likely the fraud would be detected and punished.

Read the whole story.

See you next week!

Susie Allen, senior research editor
Kellogg Insight