If you have a job in a fair-sized office and you get promoted, here is how to handle your new caste problems gracefully.

Continue at first to accept invitations to the homes of employee friends who now are your subordinates, but reciprocate only with group invitations. Then don't accept at all.

Also, you will no longer associate with your old gang during coffee breaks - you are always "too busy". They will have to understand you now have a different role in the company.

If you have a family, then you may give your wife more leeway in disengaging from the old circle of peers. After all, she is not as savvy as you are regarding the corporate rules.

Yes, the process is a gradual one but eventually there will be no contacts except in the work context. You need to understand that the higher up you climb, the more lonely it gets.

Of course, you may have known that an office caste system exists in American businesses, but did you realize the full force of this hidden management tool?

Is the caste system considered "good"? Yes - and essential. One department head told of an accounting manager having two close friends working for him who were inefficient and resented by other workers.

Now, the two clerks were directly responsible for the company's loss of $40,000 worth of business. And when their boss was asked to fire these men, he wouldn't do it. Therefore, he was fired along with his fiends, the clerks. That was the consequence of his failure to separate friendship from the demands of the business.