It's not you, it's me

At the moment, I am a relatively free man inside the corporation. I have been relieved of most of my peons and now basically have only one and he is being fired in slow motion. For me, this is more comfortable because I don't have to consider other people as much and I see no value in itself to sit on top of a big pyramid in the organization chart since my work now is best done if I have complete oversight and control myself.

I do however interact a lot with most departments in the company, both as support but also sometimes in a mild steering way (i.e. I don’t boss them around aggressively, but I do have some control over the direction). This works pretty well most of the time and I have good relations with the people. However, recently I have been working more closely with the finance department, something that I find pretty uninteresting, but there is stuff that I need to make sure is done correctly. The finance manager is a nice guy, but not very decisive and since a few weeks ago I started notice how one of his peons was starting to try to attach herself to me in terms of work. She started asking me questions directly on what to do and started reporting stuff to me first, bypassing her boss.

This is the version of infidelity inside the corporation and I can't pretend that I was completely innocent myself, I did play along to some extent. Nothing too serious though, but I had her do some work for me without me asking her boss, but no large important things, just some small menial tedious work I didn't wanna do myself and she volunteered. So maybe we "fooled around a bit" in boss - subordinate way, but I'm now worried that I might have created expectations in her that I can't meet. So recently I have been trying to cool things down, always refer her to her boss and not have her do work for me, however boring it might be, but I am not sure that the signals have gone through.

Maybe I should sit down and have a talk with her and do the “look, it’s not you, it’s me, you do great work. Sure it was great when you helped me and did that boring and tedious work for me, but I just can’t see another peon in my life right now, I have too much stuff to do on my own. Besides, your boss is a nice guy, what would he do without you?”.

Corporate life is difficult...