Making friends with employees is perhaps unwise but blindly rewarding loyalty can be equally dangerous

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Throughout history we have splendid exponents of this dictum: Plutarch reported that King Hiero was staggered when an enemy told him that he had bad breath—neither his wife nor his consorts had dared tell him the truth. When the Sung dynasty took control of China, the emperor banished his friends, who took advantage of their relationship with him and brought in his enemies, bringing with them 300 years of peaceful rule.

Corporate philosophy tells us to do otherwise. Managers and owners are encouraged to reward loyalty. My general manager at Roast has been with me for eight years, starting as a waiter at the Cinnamon Club. When I first started planning Roast he was senior head waiter and asked me if I would take him to the new venture. He worked every available shift as he was supporting his parents in Russia as well as his own family here.

I said I would take him on three conditions; I would promote him to a manager position, pay him more and insist he worked fewer hours. I explained he would be no use to me if he burned himself out and he would certainly be little help to his family. He accepted the offer, and I have his complete loyalty.

There is nothing he won't do for the company; when it snowed, our air conditioning unit on the roof packed up and while waiting for a maintenance team to turn up, he was up there trying to fix it himself. He didn't tell me he had done this, and when I found out I told him off for risking his health. To this day, I have to ask him to take holiday.

Part of me thinks that if all 88 people I employ were like Sergei, how much more successful a company we would be. Yet somehow I doubt that. Extreme loyalty like this needs careful managing—perhaps as much as potential treachery does. With self-servers, one knows what to expect, and we plan and act accordingly. When I asked a girl in my office what she would be doing over Christmas, she said she had been told to work on bank holidays because the restaurant would be open. That's a plan devised with noble intentions but which can backfire on people who don't want to over-commit but provide a valuable role.

The opposite of an enemy is not necessarily a friend. I learnt that when opening the Cinnamon Club. It took a while to get the restaurant off the ground and I had a manager whom I was reluctant to let go, so we often used to spend time going for dinner. We became friends, but when we did open he thought he could do whatever he liked. On the first Saturday night the bar manager pointed out my "friend" collapsed drunk. I lifted him out of the restaurant and told him never to return.

Making friends with your staff is thought to be a bad idea, but rewarding loyalty in a blind manner is dangerous, too. My first job was as a trainee reporter for an Asian newspaper. I rose up the ranks to become deputy editor and soon had my sights on the top job. I couldn't work out why the publisher had picked the editor for that role. He told me the editor had stuck with him in the early days when things were tough. I asked what he had done for him. "He cleaned the toilets," I was told. I walked out.

Perhaps there is much merit in the old Sufi saying: "Pick up a bee from kindness and learn the limitations of kindness."

Iqbal Wahhab is founder of Roast restaurant