I Learned Not To Take A Job As A Favour The Hard Way

Employee-boss relationships are never equal when the two are already friends

Photo by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash

Introduction

We all pick up lessons essential to our well-being at various stages of life.

Some lessons are learned by reading informative books produced by learned authors and subject matter experts. Some you learn through the experiences of others, narrated online or in person. And lastly, some lessons are picked up only from your own personal experiences in life, aka the school of hard knocks.

For me, that lesson happened to be ‘taking a job as a favour from a friend or relative’, something which I learned the rather hard way.

This applies to anyone who’s taken a job as a favour from someone in a senior position in a company and directly reports to them on the job. This could be someone who’s at the leadership level of a big company or someone who runs his/her very own startup.

The practice of hiring one’s friends or relatives to take them into their team or company once used to be so rampant in the corporate world that it even got its very own name, ‘Workplace Nepotism’:

“In simple terms, Nepotism in context of workplace is a form of favoritism that includes recommending, hiring, promoting and retaining relatives…