my friend has terrible judgment, and I’ve encouraged it

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

A few years ago, I got a promotion in a different country. The organization I had previously worked at went through a re-structure and my position was eliminated. My good friend Suzie was promoted into a position that was very similar to my former position, but higher on the org chart and with more responsibility. We stayed in touch, mostly as friends, but with cheerleading and mentoring from the sidelines too.

This role was a big jump in responsibility for Suzie; she essentially leapfrogged quite a few positions. Complicating matters is the fact that the organization is an incredibly toxic work environment. Decades of very poor decisions and bullying behavior from senior management means there is a lot of distrust and a real us vs. them culture. It is really not possible for someone in Suzie’s position to do much about the culture; without meaningful change from the board and higher-ups, things will not change. For these reasons, I knew that Suzie would have challenges, but she had worked for the org for a long time, knew what she was in for, and has always been confident in her abilities as a manager.

Over the years, Suzie will sometimes call to vent, and I’ve always supported her. When she brought in a new policy that was not well received, I empathized; that group of employees never reacts to change well. You do the best you can to make everyone feel their complaints are heard, and then you tell them that the decision is made and they need to move on.

When she needed to take some time off and “have a break” and people were grumbling about her taking PTO, I told her she deserved her PTO and should model a good work-life balance for her team.

When she started to feel like everyone hated her and was always criticizing her, I told her not to worry; she’s the face of a problem culture, and she needs to just do her best to be fair and a good leader, and try not to take it personally when people who are traumatized and miserable can’t see her efforts.

I thought my advice was solid, based on my knowledge of Suzie and the company. But I’ve just moved back to the city, and realized I’m quite off-base. I’ve heard from many former colleagues, and seen evidence myself, that Suzie is, well, a bit of a mess. She has made some appalling decisions and displayed really questionable judgement.

That policy she made? She didn’t get any feedback before she created it or rolled it out, and it’s caused huge problems and slowed down processes across the org. When people try to raise it with her, they’re told “the decision has been made and they just need to move on.”

That PTO she took? It was in the middle of a huge and important project. Pipelines got stuck because she wasn’t there to approve and give feedback, and hadn’t set up a contingency approval structure. Then to add insult to injury, she posted photos all over social media of herself at what was basically a sex festival. (No judgment of what she does in her spare time, but it’s not really a restful weekend, and posting it was very tone-deaf. It’s also really not aligned with the values of the org.) People are demonstrably more unhappy now than they were when I was there, and they feel their complaints are never heard or taken seriously. Many people have left, so those who are still there are burnt out and feeling incredibly unsupported.

I realize I’ve contributed to the problem indirectly, because I’ve been Suzie’s champion and encouraged her decisions. My question is two-fold. First, what can I do from my position of unofficial mentor to get Suzie to be more aware of her actions, especially when she’s used to hearing nothing but encouragement from me? And secondly, how can I avoid this in the future? I realize now that whenever I give advice to people, it’s always based on their perspective of the issue, and I don’t have the nuance to give informed advice or opinions.

To some extent this is always an issue with advice-giving; you’re only hearing one side of the story and it may be biased or missing important details. You can try to dig by asking questions like, “What do you think Person X’s perspective is, and why do you think they think that?” But some people will always be unreliable narrators and you won’t always be able to spot them. (Sometimes that’s intentional on their side; they want sympathy and support and so shape the way they tell the story to get that. Other times, people just don’t realize what details would be important to mention; we see that all the time in letters here.) When you give advice, you can caveat it with “There may be internal politics in your company that would change this” or “Based just on what you’re saying and without knowing the perspectives of other people involved” … but it’s never going to be perfect, because people are imperfect narrators.

However! I do think it’s worth asking whether you leaned into supporting Suzie unconditionally without questioning her version of things at all. It’s really easy to do that when you know someone’s employer sucks; when management is incompetent, it makes it easy to assume they’re always wrong and the person you like is always right. Plus, you wanted to be supportive of a friend. But since you’re reassessing it now, you could look at whether you overlooked facts that should have jumped out more or if you dismissed things that didn’t sound quite right. If you realize that you did, that’s useful info for next time (with anyone, not just with Suzie).

There’s also a question of whether you were trying to be more mentor than friend. A mentor does have a responsibility to not only cheerlead, but also to point out blind spots and nudge when someone’s perspective might benefit from a shift. Personally, I believe good friends should do that too … but with a casual friend, I don’t think you’re as obligated to do what can be fairly heavy lifting.

Still, though, you don’t want to feel like you’ve encouraged bad decisions, which it sounds like is ultimately what happened here. So the takeaway might be to remind yourself that you never have the full scope of a story you’re hearing secondhand, that there might be other perspectives in play, and that most people can benefit from advice that encourages them to consider how someone else might tell the story.

As for how to approach Suzie on all this now … one option is to start asking things like, “How do you think Person X would tell their side of it?” and “If you wanted to make your staff feel more heard, what would help?” and “What input are you getting internally on this?” And you can start saying things like, “I can’t say for sure that this is what’s going on, but it sounds to me like…” and “Hmmm, the other way to look at this is…” or “I was once struggling with this and it turned out I’d overlooked X.” Who knows, maybe she’ll find that helpful! But whether she does or doesn’t, I think you’ll feel like you’re engaging more responsibly with a situation that you now realize you don’t know as well as you thought!