A friend and colleague is now reporting to you and it does not go well.

Our former Director of Human Resources was promoted to CEO. I felt like this was a good opportunity for me to step up and apply for the position of Director of H.R. I did and I eventually got the job. I was promoted and my former colleague was also promoted from assistant HR manager to HR manager. When we promoted her to HR manager, we hired an HR generalist, so there now was a team of 3 people in our H.R. department.

It's important for you to understand is that the culture our former HR department leader (now CEO) to put it mildly, was that she was NOT well liked, and she liked it that way. In fact, the HR department was feared and she liked it that way as well.

I, on the other hand did not, so when I got the promotion, I decided we're gonna make some changes and the first order of business was to make our department a more approachable department. It took us about a year to get this culture going and running fairly smoothly.

Throughout the year I knew that the HR manager had a problem with my authority. Let's put it this way, Subtlety was not her best quality. When I gave her assignments and deadlines, the quality was not there and the deadlines were never on time, and when I say never on time, I mean never.

So now we come to the point where we have to have the conversation about friendship and the dept. structure. From the second she sat in my office, I could tell this was not going to be a good conversation. She was not looking at me. She was not engaged, she was rolling her eyes at me and I had no choice, so i let her know. Our stakehokders are watching our dept. I've been doing my very best and our open door policy is working, staff are engaged with HR. The goals are working. We are nearing the success finish line.

However, you have got to be doing a better job, your attitude, your performance is suffering. We are the HR team, so attitude is part of our job. We are the faces, our staff rely on and when you walk around the office scowling and not engaging with our staff, people take notice. Moving forward, poor work quality and missed deadlines are no longer going to be accepted. You report to me, I report to the Executives aka Decision makers. You're causing friction in our small department and, we can't have that. Unfortunately, if me being in this role is upsetting to you, than that's on you. I'm going to recommend some additional trainings, which you will complete on time. I told her we would meet again in 30 days, documented verbatim our meeting and she left my office. She never kept our appointment for the 30 day follow up and for the next 45 days, she made every attempt to not follow direction, huffed and puffed, rolled her eyes, etc., etc. The never ending saga of missing deadlines, yep she missed all. She left us no choice, so we had to let her go. The hardest conversation I've ever had, but honestly the pressure was off.

I always thought I could be that HR leader who can maintain a friendship and a working relationship at the same time. The lesson learned here. It's not as easy as it sounds. Thanks for listening.