While it is crucial to your business to appear professional to your clients, it is equally important to conduct yourself professionally with your employees.  You may have a high level of comfort with your employees due to longevity and trust.  But your actions could reduce your professional perception not only to those employees with whom you know well, but with those who may be new to the organization.

Common Sense Leadership 

1.  Communicate professionally.  Even if you have worked with your employees for years and are friendly outside of work, your language and conversation content should always remain professional inside your workplace.  If another team member, who may not already know or respect your authority, overhears your inappropriate conversation your reputation could suffer irreversible damage.  A first impression is impossible to recreate.

2.  Do what I say, but not what I do.  Your job may be to enforce company rules or your own localized rules.  An easy way to enforce your policies is to uphold them yourself.  Although you hold a higher position than your team, you are not exempt from rules or policies.  It is just more difficult and uncommon for your team to coach you than for you to coach them.  Follow your own rules.  Your team will view you as honest and a genuine leader if they see you are holding yourself accountable, too.

3.  Don’t play favorites.  Of course, we all have favorites, even though we should not.  Those employees who make our lives easier will always stand out over those who give us more gray hair.  However, other employees may become unmotivated and disappointed when they are consistently not given the opportunities and recognition that your favorites are given.  Be aware of those you favor and ensure that they are not always the center of your attention.

4.  We don’t have to be BFFs or Facebook friends.  Every manager’s dream is a strong, motivated, happy team full of employees that love their job and cannot wait to arrive at work every day.  Creating that strong team can involve getting to know each other and engaging in personal conversations.  However, you may have an employee who does not want to discuss her private life with the entire office.   She probably has a good reason for not divulging her personal information with you.  So, do not push her to share, but do not alienate her.  It may just be an issue of trust and she will gradually reveal herself as she becomes better acquainted with the team.

5.  Respect her time away from work.  Attending the company picnic or joining the employee soft ball team or volunteering with coworkers after hours are all great ways to build the team.  Ideally, your employees should want to participate in these activities, but if it is after hours it is optional.  An employee’s lack of participation should not reflect in her evaluation.  However, if she repeatedly refuses to involve herself in these activities, you may want to have a private conversation to make sure there isn’t a larger issue of which you are unaware.  Most likely, she is busy and wants to leave work life behind when she clocks out. If this is the case, make her feel welcome and keep inviting her to participate. Perhaps she will surprise the team by attending a function in the future.

Maintaining a professional work environment not only makes your job easier, but its effects trickle down to the employee/customer relationship, as well.  Your employees will understand that professionalism is mandatory in all situations and will carry that over to their interactions with clients.  Your reputation and that of your organization can only benefit from a professional environment.