Posted by denised in 
Dan Schwabel over at Brazen Careerist posed a disturbing question today – What would you do if your boss sent you a friend request on Facebook?
After picking myself up off the floor at the realization that my boss actually had a Facebook account, I’d be pretty disturbed. I haven’t always had bad bosses, but the thought of “friending” even the good ones gives me hives.
So what’s an employee to do? Schwabel narrowed our options down to three. You could just accept the friend request unconditionally, granting your boss access to the most personal and sometimes most trivial details of your life. Yeah…that would be a no for me. The second, more palatable, but still disturbing alternative would be to accept the request and utilize your Facebook account settings to restrict what your boss will be able to see. Utilizing that option would mean your boss would go to your wall, see your name, one photo of you and your dog, and know you’ve restricted his access. Finally, and definitely more up my alley, you could explain to your boss that you want to keep your business and professional lives separate. A reasonable boss would understand. Actually, a reasonable boss wouldn’t have made the friend request in the first place.
The flip side of granting your boss too much access to your personal life is learning way more than you ever wanted to know about his. Who cares what he had for breakfast or where he was on Saturday night? And I for one, DO NOT want to see his semi-nude beach photos or who he’s been sending cocktails to. That said, I choose option four, ignore his friend request all together. Career suicide? I doubt it, but if he’s that bad, I’m probably working on getting out of there anyway. How would you deal with a friend request from a boss?
