For improving your professional life, you need to have a healthy and strong relation with your boss and colleagues. However, if you get very close to the officials of the company where you work, this overly bonded relation can kill your professional career.
Speaking in terms of workplace psychology, it is great to create personal links at work as well as developing the research demonstrations having close relations is the biggest contributor to your job success, but things get weird when you have developed personal relations or closest links with your boss. This can potentially harm your job and career.
You need to know when you are about to cross the limits before it gets too late!
1. You don’t receive positive feedback or evaluations about your work:
There must be a border line between you and your boss. When you get closer to your boss, you may notice that you have not been receiving any of the positive feedbacks or guidelines about the future of your career. Bosses always make sometimes hard conversations with their employers, but as you have crossed the border line, you won’t be having any constructive criticism from your boss, which actually works like a fuel to make you moving forward.
2. You get a feeling of being a boss’s pet:
This step is kind of red flag and one of the first sign that you are touching the boundary. You get excluded from the various team projects and offered for lunches more often. This is quite a dangerous situation – especially along with the claims of sexual harassment and bullying for other members but not for you. in this case, you are also at risk of getting difficulties with your co-workers too.
3. Your boss shares inside jokes with you which makes other workers uncomfortable:
It is OK if you have developed a friendship with your superiors outside your workplace. But, if your boss starts to make inside jokes with you particularly when you are at the workplace, this may create a sense of non-professionalism and non-seriousness around the office. When you are in a meeting, and you or your boss start to share glimpses or the jokes with each other, you should know that you have gotten too close to your boss. Even all other colleagues will notice it.
4. You are getting more social than being professional:
The line amid the social and professional links gets narrow when you get closer to your boss. More dangerous thing is that when you don’t find any guide which you need because your meetings get more of social than being professional. To handle such a situation, you should start sending the work-related points to your boss beforehand, so that the center of discussion remains at the work.
5. You feel it necessary to look at the things other than work:
If you are being invited to lunch by your boss, that’s another thing. However, if are feel single out of other colleagues, and it is happening frequently, the situation becomes alarming. Especially, if it is coupled with other things like drinking or late night dinner, the relation with your boss has crossed the healthy boundaries. What should happen is that you complete your work during normal office hours, and never ever feel uneasy with your boss. If you feel like that, you should instantly speak up about it at that moment.
6. You vent with your boss like two close friends do:
There are few things which when you share with your boss, can destruct your image and breaks the limit of you cooperate relations with your boss. Everything you say to your boss, affect your impression. So, be vigilant about the words you utter. If you feel that you are venting with your bosses like talking to him about your personal problems or your problems regarding the workplace, you might be at risk of getting unnecessarily closer to your boss.
7. When flirty moves get involved:
When you start feeling yourself differentiating between the date time and the official time, you should start thinking about developing a strategy to deal with this scenario. Your boss calls you with certain fancy or joyous name along with unwanted touches and other affectionate moves, you are in danger.
You may start to feel uncomfortable and these changes will be sudden and frequent. In this case, it becomes hard to concentrate on your job and work efficiently and productively. More you wait for these circumstances to be stopped, harder it becomes to survive – and the legal complications regarding can be even worse. Your boss, you and your colleagues can be in a hostile working environment which makes it very suffocating and much challenging to work in that company.
So, learn to take each step wisely and avoid the things which can destruct your relation with your boss!