Here at YES! Your Human Resources Solution, we understand that being a leader is tough.  Employees will look to you for guidance and support.  You will also be looked to as an example of a model company employee, despite—or perhaps because of—the twists and turns and unexpected challenges that lie along your career path.  To really shine, keep a cool head through these challenges that test every leader.

• Fairness.  We’re starting here because fairness covers a lot of ground.  At the end of the day, fairness is about giving everyone a reasonable shot with regard to their skillsets, experience, and potential.  Fairness means avoiding favoritism and nepotism, such as offering fewer rules or greater promotion opportunities to friends and family who work for the company.  It also means not picking on employees you don’t like all that much.  This is especially important because fairness walks a fine line beside discrimination.  As a leader, your blatant dislike of an employee through unfavorable job assignments or tougher disciplinary measures may snowball into a discrimination or harassment claim.  So make sure you’re applying discipline policies uniformly across all your employees, and that you’re offering assignments based on merit, not on your personal affinities.  Of course, every employee’s communication is unique to the employee and the situation, and decisions based on applied policies and principles may still vary from situation to situation and from employee to employee.
• Conflict resolution.  As a leader, you’re responsible for your team’s success, and that means working out any problems that crop up between team members.  Nobody likes jumping into the middle of someone else’s conflict, but it’s a necessary evil to keep business running at its most productive.  And don’t wait for employees to come to you with a problem; keep your eyes open and work proactively to cinch any conflicts before they become Human Resources grievances.  Discuss conflicts privately with the involved employees, and work together to reach a solution everyone can agree on.
• Command presence.  One of the hardest things to accept in any position of authority is that the job doesn’t always come with a healthy dose of “like” from your reports.  (Just ask any parent out there.)  A particularly difficult challenge is to find an effective balance between being a boss and being a friend.  Too heavy a lean to the boss side, and your authoritarian leadership style will leave your employees demoralized and resentful.  Too heavy a lean to the friend side, and your laxed leadership style will leave your employees unproductive and unfocused.  You want to find a balance where employees respect your authority but still feel comfortable talking to you about concerns.

Being a leader is tough!  But the job can be as rewarding as it is demanding.  Even though the job isn’t always pretty, rising with grace to meet difficult situations will help you mature as a leader.  Together with time and practice, facing these tough tasks will help you reap the greatest rewards, by growing you into the most effective leader you can be.