Show Notes
Andy and Mon-Chaio tackle the intriguing question: ‘Are we friends?’ in this episode of the TTL podcast. They explore the significance of workplace friendships, discussing how these relationships impact job satisfaction, organizational performance, and employee behavior. The hosts look into the role of physical proximity and shared experiences in fostering interdependence, and even touch on the potential challenges of managerial relationships with direct reports. Listeners will gain insights from research on the benefits and complexities of workplace friendships and may be surprised to learn about the nuanced effects of friendship on psychological safety and innovative behavior.
References
- Understanding Workplace Relationships – https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-16640-2
- Do we need friendship in the workplace? The effect on innovative behavior and mediating role of psychological safety – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-022-03949-4
- Relationally Charged: How and When Workplace Friendship Facilitates Employee Interpersonal Citizenship – https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00190/full
Transcript
Andy: Welcome back for another episode of the TTL podcast, where Mon Chao and I attempt to answer the unanswerable question. Are we friends? Are we?
Mon-Chaio: I don’t think so. We are colleagues separated by a large distance who see each other every week. And probably spend more time on these calls talking about things that are not related to the topic. Some of it which we edit out when we record and some of it before we even start recording. So is that, does that make us friends, Andy?
Andy: That’s a good question. I don’t know. And does it matter? Does it matter if we’re friends or not?
Mon-Chaio: Does it matter. I think that’s a good question. Do we have to be friends in order to do a podcast?
Andy: That, I mean, it, it might help, but, you know, us, we need to find out. Is there any research on this?
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: dear listener, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Are we friends and does it matter? Which, when I put it that way, sounds like a very strange topic.
Mon-Chaio: So it’s not, it’s not that are we friends, Andy, we know we are facetiously, obviously, but we know the, we know the answer to that question. The, the question that we’re trying to answer through research is do you have to be friends with your co
Andy: exactly.
Mon-Chaio: And I was also hoping to find some research around, do you have to be friends with your direct reports?
And if so, how friendly do you have to be? So, like a lot of these things, I have background, right? My first leadership position way back in the, I think, mid 2000s. I very clearly remember the VP of Engineering at the, no, no, sorry, it was the CTO at the time. Um, a small organization, it was Cardamon, The CTO at the time told me.
you can’t be friends with your direct reports otherwise how are you supposed to fire them.
Andy: Because you can’t, if it’s a friendship, you can’t do anything to, possibly harm that person. Is the, was that the underlying message? Or the underlying belief, do you think?
Mon-Chaio: Think that was definitely a big part of it. I think maybe the other unstated part was that you were going to be biased. You have some people that you’re friends with, other people that you’re not friends with, how can you possibly be unbiased and make difficult decisions for the company without taking those into account?
Andy: That’s it. It’s, it’s a good question. And you’re bringing it up in a way that I think you’re, you’re thinking that it, it’s not necessarily true that way of, of thinking about it. Is that where you were getting to?
Mon-Chaio: Well, I thought it was true for a long time. Remember, I was a first time manager at that point in
Andy: You’re young and impressionable
Mon-Chaio: Right. Very young and impressionable. And so when this CTO person, who actually had experience, lots of experience, gray hairs, as some people call them.
In terms of, uh, leading technical organizations told me that it got me thinking. I said, that seems to make sense. There’s this difference between work life and personal life, and you can have your personal friends. And then at work, you should not have friends because your job as a leader is to be unattached, dispassionate. But over my career, there’s this other stream that comes in that says, and we’ve talked about this before as well. You have to get to know your employees in order to build the best possible relationships and in order to get the most out of them. This is the, I think, the way that we often talk about it, or maybe it’s just me, is the how was your weekend conversation, right?
And it took me a long time to learn that when I come in on Monday, I should be asking, how was your weekend? And it took me even longer than that to learn that I should actually listen. Because it’s not this, it’s not just, uh, I ask it and then magically my organization is all powerful and and effective, right?
It’s actually listening and connecting with the people. So, then that gets into the question of, okay, well, how far do you have to go? Like, you come in and ask how their weekend was and that’s okay, that’s enough. Is it that you have to remember over multiple weeks what they said and follow up with them? Is it less transactional than even that where you have to care somewhat about their personal lives? Um so that when you’re asking how was your weekend? It’s not a checkbox that you do But it’s something that really interests you too is that you have to remember their kids names and their kids hobbies and whether they’re having a new another kid and Um where they’re going on vacation like how far do you have to go?
Do you have to reciprocate? Do you have to,
you right? Oh, oh great
Andy: do you have to tell them about your weekend? The problems that you’re having, the, the, the, the things that you’re enjoying in, in, in your outside of work life?
Mon-Chaio: And this actually came to, I wouldn’t even say it came to a head, but another aspect of it came in through the pandemic for me. Because I kept hearing this statement made by folks that remote work was great because they weren’t forced to make work friendships. That they could be friends with who they wanted. And there wasn’t this concept of, oh, I have to go to work and pretend to be friends with all these people. Then everyone gets together for snacks at three or tea time. And I have to go there and socialize. I can work when I’m at work. Um, and socialize with the people that I care about when I want to socialize with the people that I
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: So I think for me, personally, all of that came together to make this topic pretty interesting to say, Okay, well, what does the research say about all of this? Is it important? Is it not important? Should we be dispassionate leaders and peers and co workers? Should we try to be friends with as many people as possible and take them on our fishing trips?
Like, what, what does the research say, if anything, about this stuff
Andy: Alright, well, let’s start diving in a little bit. So the research that you were looking at Mon Chiao, and I will admit to our listeners, I’ve been very busy. Speaking of what did you do for your weekend? I’ve been away making a chair for the past week. So I, I’ve, not had much time to do the research on this.
So we’re going to be relying on Mon Chaio and his, his understanding of the research and where he got to. So Mon Chaio, what’s the broad overview? Like, is there a consensus in what you were finding, or is this just kind of like, it’s all over the place, like some of the other things that we look into?
Mon-Chaio: I think there is a pretty strong consensus that workplace friendships are important and lead to better performance, especially around innovative type tasks. Now some of the researchers have pointed out that research in general has tended to ignore the negative impacts of workplace relationships, such as the ability to not be, to not be able to authentically show up. There’s been negative impacts that have been studied or another negative Another impact that has shown up in research is the fact that cliques tend to form between friendship groups and non friendship groups. And in the work environment, knowledge sharing tends to decrease between non friendship groups and increase between friendship groups.
And some researchers will say that those types of negative impacts haven’t been studied enough. But the most clear research is that workplace friendships are positive. For organizational performance.
Andy: And it would seem, in those things, especially the one about the cliques and the knowledge transfer, that the solution is not to get rid of friendships, the solution is to expand the groups and intermingle the groups more. Um, because if, if the knowledge flows better within the friendship groups, well then getting those friendship groups to encompass more of, more of your company and span cliques, that seems like that’s the better solution than the like, okay, let’s just go off of a transactional no friendship relationship here.
Mon-Chaio: Oh, absolutely And I think that’s what researchers are saying is that we need to look into that and design tactics in order that take into account these types of negative effects versus pushing them under the rug and just saying well, you know, that’s fine and everything but let’s have more workplace friendships. And as I was going through the research some of the research was I guess what I would call kind of a nuance, that’s not a fair word.
I feel like some of the research was, felt like things that you would already know. So as an example, Harvard Business Review did a huge paper where they, it was basically their meta study in some ways their I wouldn’t call it a meta study because it wasn’t Um, it wasn’t rigorous that way, right? It was their review of a large number of research papers And what they found was that positive affect at work increases work performance. Okay. Yeah. I mean you could see that
Andy: If I’m not miserable, uh, I might be doing a bit better. I might put in a bit more effort.
Mon-Chaio: Right, so that that kind of research and there’s a lot of research around that seems to make sense and even they will say that that doesn’t even necessarily mean anything about friendships. Friendships do cause positive affect but there was in their review there wasn’t a study of well how much affect is caused by friendships versus other things In fact, they even note that perhaps work autonomy
Andy: Hmm.
Mon-Chaio: gives you more positive affect, but the general relationship that the happier you are at work the better you perform I think that was, that was something that they researched and seems to make sense
Andy: In all of these papers, and because this is a thing that we encounter all the time when we’re, when we’re looking for this kind of stuff, there’s the whole operation, operationalization of the concept. So we’re working with this concept friendship. Did they have a, is there like a, a friendship inventory or is there a consistent test or was this all based on just like people saying, Oh yeah, I’m friends with John over there.
Mon-Chaio: So, uh, that, this has also been well studied. Um, I don’t have the inventory in front of
Andy: Oh, there is one. There there is a friendship inventory.
Mon-Chaio: I don’t, I don’t think there’s a well known one, but a lot of papers do talk about different levels of friendship, kind of the phases of friendship. So for example, one paper actually defines workplace friendship.
They define it as an informal, voluntary relationship between two workers. Sorry, between two co workers that is based on reciprocal liking and mutual interest in each other as whole persons. So, importantly, right, it has to be voluntary. The second part that they talk about is that these friendships generally don’t; it’s not that they generally don’t, they’re not required to be along reporting lines or have any relationship to do with the physical structure of how you work. And then, um, they talk about things like workplace friendships are characterized by reciprocal positive affect as friends like each other, are mutually committed to each other, and exchange emotional and other forms of support.
So that last part I think is important. And that, I think, takes it from beyond just a casual, transactional based work relationship to something more like friends. This paper also talks about, again, the stages. You become casual friends first, and then as you work together, then you become intermediate, then you become best friends. Again not mind blowing that that’s
Andy: And then your BFFs, and then, and then you’re work husbands, work wives. Have you ever had that? Have you ever encountered that, that way of thinking about it?
Mon-Chaio: yeah. Hasn’t Rebecca called you my
Andy: Yeah, yeah, I’ve had it with several people now where someone’s spouse called me someone else’s work husband.
First time it happened was very confused. I was like, what are we talking about?
Mon-Chaio: and then a lot of research papers would also go into what’s necessary for friendship maintenance and all of that sort of stuff, right? So there’s a, there is a lot of study
Andy: Yeah, you got to update the libraries keep keep things running
Mon-Chaio: right?
Andy: New JDK is out install that in Mon Chaio.
Mon-Chaio: Exactly. Well, and there might be a breaking
Andy: Yeah. Yeah, you got to look out for those. All right. So, what I got from that is there’s, there’s, there are definitions of this. There’s various stages that people go through to be in friendships. the, the thing that you mentioned about, it doesn’t follow
um, reporting lines, it’s not necessary, but it’s kind of a thing that it is a thing that goes on in it. And that ties back probably to the thing about innovation and information flowing along those lines and this goes to, do we need to be friends? I’m, I’m starting to lean towards almost, yes, we do. If we want a really effective organization, we almost need to be friends because we want, we want, we’re going to have an organizational structure.
We’re going to have teams, we’re going to have people who are working closely together, but we still need those connections, those tendrils going out across the organization that are pulling information around and through. I’m looking at this from a very utilitarian standpoint of as a manager, as a leader of an organization, why might you want to be doing these things?
And it’s sounding like, well, those friendships are really what build up those cross, cross the hierarchy lateral connections that are what make the place actually work.
Mon-Chaio: . Well, and I think what you’re starting to get into is the why, right? So, I think there is a lot of research that shows workplace friendships increase things like employee job satisfaction. They increase things like organizational performance, but the question is why like what are the mechanisms perhaps by which they increase it and there has been study around that too.
So for example, there was this paper that found that it affected innovative behavior. Now, of course, i’m always interested in how they measure this type of stuff and innovative behavior was measured via questionnaire. I couldn’t get access to the actual questionnaire.
It was noted that the questionnaire was created by another team of researchers. I tried to find that paper. I couldn’t. It’s not that it didn’t exist. I was only able to find citations and non public access to
Andy: This is the, this, I find this when we have, whenever we’re doing our research, I find this to be one of the most frustrating things is there’s like, there’s this foundational paper that’s referenced. And I can find the references. I might be able to find the abstract, but I can’t find the paper. So I have to go off of the way everyone else has reported what it found and what it meant.
And usually that paper also is where like the questionnaire or the, or the, um, the instrument that everyone’s using came from, but I can’t find it. I can’t tell what is it that they’re measuring in that. And it’s always so frustrating because we end up with these things of like, Oh yeah, there is a way of measuring this.
Don’t know what it is. People are using it, don’t know where to find it.
Mon-Chaio: Oh, at least in this case, it was just around these questions around innovative behavior. They actually gave one example of one of the questions, but I think there were five or ten and so, you know, then I couldn’t look at the other ones So what this paper found though was that friendship opportunity and friendship prevalence were positively affected Or positively affected innovative behavior as measured by people doing these questionnaires. What was interesting I found in this Was that friendship prevalence was positively correlated in relation to psychological safety. We talk a lot about the need for psychological safety in a lot of these podcasts that we do. However, psychological safety did not have a mediating role between workplace friendship and innovative behavior. So, to remind listeners who aren’t in this day in and day out for us, that means that there was a positive relationship found between workplace friendships and innovative behavior. There was a positive relationship found between workplace friendships and psychological safety.
But based on what they found, they don’t believe that the reason or the primary reason or a strong reason between why workplace friendships affected positively innovative behavior was because of psychological safety.
Andy: Right. So psychological safety is not sitting in between them.
Mon-Chaio: Right. It doesn’t mediate that relationship. So workplace friendships positive in two directions, but it’s not because of psychological safety, innovative behavior
Andy: we got, we got, we’ve got correlation. We’ve got good evidence that it’s correlation, not causation that’s going on there.
Mon-Chaio: That’s exactly right. So all of that is very positive. If it makes, if it creates more psychological safety, that’s a positive. If it creates more innovative behavior, that’s most often a positive, and we can talk a little bit about why that may be, why that nuance is probably important. And then I’ll just talk about quickly, there was also a paper that said, workplace friendships increase an employee’s relational energy, which subsequently leads to greater interpersonal citizenship.
So, interpersonal citizenship is the concept that you will go out of your way to help the other people, or generally your peers and other co workers, the company, in doing things that aren’t just directly part of your job description that you will help them because you want to help them as people and
Andy: to my thing about, uh, the people going and helping the whole organization. It’s that kind of thing. It’s that citizenship behavior is really what it is that you’re looking for. It goes back to the, the most effective form of industrial action is work to rule where you do exactly what your job description says because most of what we actually get done comes from not doing that.
It comes from all the little help that you give to everyone else, the, the rearranging the work so that someone else gets unblocked and, and doing all these things like, uh, helping them fill out that form that you you aren’t supposed to really be doing, but you can help. And the friendships just make all of that easier, make it more likely to occur, make it, make it so you know who to talk to and you’re comfortable asking them.
Mon-Chaio: we talk a lot about the importance, the criticality of that work around the edges. We talked about it. I think in our living on the edge of chaos episode, we talked about it. I think in I can’t remember. When was the most? Oh, I think in the uh, do peer reviews matter episode. That is the actual work that drives organizations.
And so when you see these concepts like quiet quitting that you see so often, this idea of I will only do what I’m required to do and to know more, that is an antithesis to that. And it may be fine for the individual and it may be the best thing for that individual, uh, for many reasons. Perhaps the company hasn’t built a great culture, they’re not in the right role, uh, you know, the company doesn’t treat its employees right, whatever the case may be. Individuals operating in that role cannot maximize the output of a company because most of the important work happens around the edges. So, I think, to me, those are kind of well known, but those are the reasons, in my mind, why workplace friendships lead to higher performance. And then I think the other aspect of it comes down to things around remote work too, which is the easiest way to build friendships is around physical proximity. And remote work becomes very transactional. And we’ve talked at times about how work is becoming more and more siloed, individualized, and transactional in this remote work era.
And so, therefore, you don’t build as many friendships there. So now the question is do you need to now implement initiatives to help build more friendships? And more workplace friendships in this sort of remote work area, uh, environment.
Andy: Possibly. What, what would that look like? Is it, Is this going and, um, doing, uh, uh, virtual escape rooms together or is it, is it just saying that there’s five minutes that you’re generally going to be having at the front start of the meeting where you’re not trying to, to start the meeting yet? What kinds of things would this be?
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I don’t, so my research wasn’t really focused on how do you generate workplace friendships. Obviously I read a bunch of that stuff, but I didn’t take any notes on it because I mostly focused on, does it matter. And I think we talked about, or I’ve already mentioned one of them, which is physical proximity. So that means gathering people together.
Andy: And that is a thing, Mon Chaio, when we do due diligences for companies and we notice, Hey, you’re You’re a remote team. A very common recommendation or a common question to start with is, how often or when do you get together? And usually what I end up hearing, and you probably hear this as well, is, Oh yeah, we got together about maybe 18 months ago, and that was it. so a recommendation is generally like, nope, schedule that as a regular thing. Something to get you all together. I also on those always say, and it’s not just a social get together. It’s not just like, oh, we’re going to fly everyone over. and have some beers together. No, it’s you’re going to fly them over and you’re going to do something related to work.
But part of that is the social aspect.
Mon-Chaio: mhm. Now we touched on this in the morale event as well. That can’t just be this, you’re just gonna go bowling and that’s the end all be all. I think, this isn’t the most current due diligence I’ve, I think it was two due diligences ago. So like earlier, maybe last month, maybe last month, there was a company who, where one of the employees said, well, we do get together, but most of us live pretty far away.
And the company requires us to reimburse our own travel expenses into the office.
Andy: Oh wait, they’re, they’re required to pay for going in?
Mon-Chaio: Yes, they, so their transit expenses are paid out of pocket. The employees pay that out of pocket and it’s not reimbursed by the company.
Andy: wow.
Mon-Chaio: Uh, you can imagine what one of my recommendations
Andy: Just pay
Mon-Chaio: for that company.
Andy: It’s a small amount to pay to make people feel like they’re being supported in this. Mm
Mon-Chaio: I believe I even used the phrase penny wise pound foolish there. I mean, how much can travel expenses cost? But yes. Yes. So, but what do you have to do? So one is definitely gathering together in person as you, as much as possible. But the second one that remains in my mind, and again, because I didn’t take notes, I’m going to point out that there is some bias here, right?
The things that I remember are likely the things that speak to me or the things that didn’t speak to me, but we’re so far in left field that I couldn’t forget them. Right. So this isn’t like most of the research where we try to be a little bit more, more measured on both sides, uh, because this part wasn’t what I was studying.
But the other thing that I remember that being called out pretty clearly was friendships are built by working together.
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And so having people having interdependence people interdepending on each other is what builds workplace friendships as well. And so even if you’re not gathering them together, which I still think is super important, I think it’s like, you know, that 50%.
The other 50 percent is make sure the work is interdependent. Make sure somebody can’t do a thing without somebody else also doing a thing. And to be honest, there wasn’t, I didn’t read any research about this interdependence is very often mistaken, I think, Andy, you were the one that introduced this term to me, with dependence.
Andy: hmm.
Mon-Chaio: So, I don’t think dependence spills workplace relationships, or friendships, it’s interdependence. So what’s the difference? One difference might be, at least the way that I think about it, Hey Andy, in order to record this podcast, I need this from you. When will you be done with it? That’s dependence. I am dependent on you.
You produce something, I Here’s the, here are your notes. I take it. I’m like, I’m off and running. See ya. But interdependence is truly about working together in smaller cycles and being more dependent on each small thing that you do. So, I can’t get to the next phrase of this podcast without hearing your thoughts on the phrase.
Or, we are actually responsible for this KPI together, and that means everything you do affects my KPI. I can’t just let you out for a week or two weeks to kind of do your own thing, because like, the small nuances of how you do it is important. We need to be involved. So, Again, uh, interdependence versus dependence.
That’s how I think
Andy: The, the addition for me for interdependence is it’s, it’s both sides. It’s you need me to make that next step on the podcast, but I also need you. And so we’re both, we’re kind of like, we’re in this together. Dependence is you’re in it and I’m sitting on the sideline. And independence is we’re both in completely different things.
Mon-Chaio: I still think there’s nuance there between dependence and interdependence. I’ve seen things at companies, for example, which is, I am dependent on you because you’re a platform team creating a module that I need to use but the company leadership would say that we’re interdependent because gee the platform team has a kpi to enable this module for you
therefore they have to do it and if they don’t do it ostensibly they get dinged to me. That’s not interdependence. That may be technically interdependence
Andy: It, it will come down to whether or not they believe they are interdependent on each other
I, I think is a big part of it is like, you can say like this very abstract level, oh, we’re all going for the same goal, but maybe that’s not what we’re experiencing and living every day. It’s not the, the message we get from bringing it back to this from the friendships that we have. We’re feeling very separate even though that yes, technically we’re all here to, get that next cell sale. So I, yeah, I agree. I think it’s, it’s very nuanced and that, that’s why it’s kind of difficult at times to see it. But I have a very good example of the interdependence and kind of, I think a bit of a little bit ability to, to grow friendship relationships, really helping things.
So a team that I’ve been working with. I started them on mob programming. We went straight from me prompting them to pair program to saying, just saying, nope, we’re doing mob programming now. And I wasn’t at all sure how it was going to go. But what’s happened is they’re talking to each other now.
And the problems that they’re bringing up to me is that it’s, they’re learning. They didn’t know how any of the rest of the system worked. And now they are learning. And they’re, and I’m watching them and they’re, they’re starting to, to engage more. People are talking. Uh, one thing that was brought up to me was, uh, someone said, Oh yeah, this other part of the group.
They’re actually engaging. I was worried that they wouldn’t, but they seem to be doing that. The friendships aren’t quite there yet, some of that interdependency is starting to become more apparent to the people doing the work. So, uh, one of the things I’m taking from this is one of the next things to start working on with this group is is actually those friendships.
So that people will be more willing to speak up, will be more willing to just kind of jump in and, and say, oh yeah, this is what we need to do next. I think it’s there a little bit, but I think there’s, there’s a little bit that needs to happen to, to grow those friendships a bit more so that they, they, they feel like, I don’t know what it is.
Maybe it’s, they feel like they have a right to have an opinion in the group.
Mon-Chaio: And this will be interesting, Andy. I’m curious how you feel like you’re going to grow those friendships because we know that workplace friendships, at least as defined by this one place, this one research paper is informal. So, I imagine you’re not going to go and say, hey, you, you become friends with him.
I want to see my KPI for this is you have beers at least three times a week, uh, after work, right? So how. How are you going to grow these friendships? Yeah,
Andy: I’ve always done, and I was going to bring this up, was to ask, does the research say anything about this, is growing a friendship means being vulnerable. Because growing a friendship means revealing something about yourself, about the situation you are in, that someone could possibly use against you for something.
So, say, it could be an emotional thing, it could be a physical thing . Could be that just you, you don’t want to have someone know this thing, you feel anxious if someone even knows this thing about you. And so something I do is I’m usually very open about like things that I’m up to and what I’m thinking about and how I’m doing.
And I do it mainly, I do it partly just because that’s what I do. But I also sometimes do it somewhat consciously to set an example of, hey, talking about like literally what we were doing this weekend is completely okay. Because I know I am in a position of authority. And if the person in the position of authority can talk about this.
Maybe others can talk about it. At least that’s the hope that I have. It sometimes works out, sometimes it doesn’t. It really depends. It really comes down to that person’s willingness to be vulnerable.
Mon-Chaio: I think that’s definitely part of it. That modeling behavior is such a big part. I think if it’s missing, it’s very unlikely for those friendships to form. And so it has to be there to some extent. I have certainly seen it work and I’ve seen it not work. My most recent example was there was a VP who led, I think it was almost a 500 person group at that point in time.
They would hold a regular sort of directs meeting or a directs and skips meeting for their senior leaders and one thing they would do is they would always talk about their weekend and they would write a post about it and post it publicly. I don’t know they’re not necessarily, you know, got people thinking or talking.
Um, so, but I do, but I do think it’s important. It’s, it’s better than if they don’t, right? And I think, um,
Andy: there may be correlation, but it may, it’s maybe not as simple causation.
Mon-Chaio: right, right. And we already talked about this, but as I mentioned, friendships are people that are mutually committed to one another and exchange emotional and other forms of support. So I think that goes to your point, Andy, about the requirement for vulnerability and knowing each other deep, deeper as people. I don’t really have a great tactic around building workplace friendships either. Except to lean again on those two pillars that we’ve talked about which is proximity and shared intent, shared goals,
Andy: Shared experience.
Mon-Chaio: I like that term, interdependence.
Andy: And I would say shared experience. think that’s going back to this example of the mob programming now. They’re growing so much more shared experience than they had before. Because in the past, their workday was basically independent experience. Whereas now what they’re actually getting is completely shared experience.
All of us spent two hours trying to figure out how to get what seemed like a very simple bit of code under test. And now we all have, actually, at the very end of my day today, we spent, I don’t know, 15 minutes trying to figure out why the hell we couldn’t just check to see in Swift, why we couldn’t just check if this value was this particular enum value.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Apparently you can’t just do an equality check. It’s not that simple. And so we spent, we had that now, we have that shared experience of fighting with this language for, I don’t know, 15, 20 minutes. It was something like that while we’re all just Googling and swearing at each, swearing, uh, under our breaths as we’re trying to figure out how to write this code.
And I think that something like that is, will bring them closer together.
Mon-Chaio: I think that makes sense in my mind. So proximity, interdependence, and shared experiences I think is how you build workplace relationships. One thing that I tried researching and didn’t get much on was whether there was a difference between peer workplace friendships and supervisor or leadership workplace friendships. The question I wanted to try to answer was although workplace friendships are important and have all of these, all of these benefits, as a leader, should you have workplace friendships beyond your peers with your directs and, and how? And I wasn’t able to answer that question.
Um, in, in terms of research. But what do you think? Do you have a thought on that?
Andy: I do. And I think you should, I think you should still have those relationships. Um, I believe we started this with, uh, you saying that you were told not to do it because how would you be able to be objective? All of that. And my take on it is I have to admit that even without those relationships, I’m not objective.
So to me, it just brings, it just brings it all to the surface that what the reality already is anyway. And we’re human. I can’t, I can’t stop having a closer relationship to one person versus another. It’s going to happen. But what I can do is acknowledge that those relationships are there, try to have a good friendly friendship relationship with as many as I can, and then also make use of those relationships.
Because, uh, one of the things is how are you going to be able to fire someone? Well, I think that I should be able to separate what is needed for this organization to continue from the personal relationship, and I can also use what the, the organization needs to help the personal relationship.
Because, if they’re truly a friend, I don’t want them to make things worse. Like, say, say they’re, they’ve, there’s been some sort of terrible harassment thing going on.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: They can still be a friend, but I can say, this is not a good place for you to be.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: So I can still use that friendship to do what needs to happen.
Mon-Chaio: I agree. I agree. I like the fact that you talked about we’re not unbiased anyway. I do think friendships make it somewhat more difficult to be unbiased, but we’re not unbiased anyway. And I think that’s part of being a good leader is being able to step between levels of relationships. Honestly, I have not found a problem with being able to fire workplace friends. You know, oftentimes they’re, you know, they’re layoff decisions most of the time, and that’s something that happens at the organization level and you have to communicate it. And that’s that, right? That happens. So although I truly thought about that and believe that when I was initially told that in my first leadership job over the next 20 some odd years, I just haven’t found that to be something that where I think, Oh, well, Yeah, I don’t know.
Let me think about friendships in this way again. So I agree with you on that.
Andy: Do you have any insights, any other insights on that in terms of, uh, how to handle those relationships as you, As you build up a friendship, are there, are there certain boundaries you put in place? Or, or do you just let it go wherever it’s going to go?
Mon-Chaio: So Again, I wasn’t exactly researching this but one thing that I remember that came out of the research was talking to a friend and saying things like I am now having a conversation with you as your manager as your skip level and not your buddy and as professionals we need to be able to handle that, right?
Andy: putting on my hat as your manager right now. This is what we need to talk about.
Mon-Chaio: right exactly But honestly throughout my career it doesn’t matter whether it’s a work friendship or a personal friendship or whatever, there’s always times and when you have to deliver difficult messages or you have to redefine the bounds of what it means and there’s always boundaries around all of your friendships, right?
Not all of your friends are your best friends, you know, some friends you might let stay in your house. And sometimes you might be like, eh, you know, I’ll pay for a hotel. And for some friends, you’d be like, let me, let me see what my network has going on. Right. There’s always boundaries around friendships. And so I think that is kind of the thing that I think about, which is it’s no different in the workplace. And I think if it is different then that probably is more problematic. And it is something that you should think about why is it different in the workplace than it is in your other friendships?
Andy: I really like that. I really like that as a message to end a conversation on, friendships. We’re all friends here. Is that what we should be aiming for? Is that there are different kinds of friendships, different things that you do for different people, and that extends all the way into the workplace and how you, how you handle, uh, the people around you at work.
So Mon Chiao, I think we’ll sign off with that. That nugget of wisdom. For everyone out there who’s been listening, I hope you enjoyed what you got out of this. If you have any questions, if you have any comments, drop us a line. If you would like us to come in and help you at your organization, build up your friendships, or destroy your friendships, we can do that too.
Yeah, just drop us a line as well. We are hosts at thettlpodcast. com. And until next time, Mon Chao, be kind and stay curious.
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