How to Make Better Friends at Work
Friendships in the workplace can enrich our lives and make us better leaders and workers if we make the effort to cultivate truly healthy relationships.
Anna Godeassi/theispot.com
I don’t remember the moment that Francesco and I started referring to our friendship as a place. But in the grind of medical school rotations nearly 30 years ago, a flower bed between a parking lot and the building that hosted the internal medicine wards became “the friendship.” That’s what our friendship felt like then: A scruffy patch of nature wedged between the workplace and the comings and goings of daily life. “Come to the friendship!” one of us would say when the other was agitated or idle. We would walk out, sit there for a while, and then get back to work a little sharper, braver, and, some would say, more obnoxious for it.
Research has long established that friendship blossoms where people with similar interests spend time together, share meaningful and intense tasks, face uncertainty, and need each other’s help.1 Francesco’s and my workplace ticked all those boxes, and soon our friendship wasn’t confined to it. In the friendship, we jumped between reviewing a procedure we had just seen and dissecting failed romances, sharing career dreams and making plans for the weekend. It was the first of a handful of work friendships without which I would not be writing this essay, do the work I do, or be who I am. It was also the beginning of a quest to understand friendship at work and what it takes to make those friendships work.
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The workplace can be fertile ground for budding friendships because of the proximity that forming friendships requires. But growing friendships at work can be problematic. The philosopher George Santayana wrote that friends are the people “with which one can be human” — that is, a complex and conflicted person, not just the competent occupant of a role. By definition, friendship challenges the norms of instrumentality and impersonality in force at many workplaces. For that same reason, if nurtured properly, friendship can be a potent humanizing influence for ourselves and our colleagues.
It’s no wonder that as work becomes more technological and workplaces more remote, there has been renewed interest in friendship. Hybrid work might make us more productive, but it also risks making us less connected.2 It deprives us of the serendipitous encounters and idle time with coworkers that could turn into life-changing friendships.
References
1. T.M. Newcomb, “The Acquaintance Process” (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961).
2. C.N. Hadley and M. Mortensen, “Are Your Team Members Lonely?” MIT Sloan Management Review 62, no. 2 (winter 2021): 36-40.
3. G. Petriglieri, “In Praise of the Office,” Harvard Business Review, July 15, 2020, https://hbr.org.
4. G.R. Kellerman and M. Seligman, “Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work With Resilience, Creativity, and Connection — Now and in an Uncertain Future” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023).
5. L. Gratton, “Why You Should Make Friends at Work,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Oct. 13, 2022, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.
6. G. Petriglieri, J.L. Petriglieri, and J.D. Wood, “Fast Tracks and Inner Journeys: Crafting Portable Selves for Contemporary Careers,” Administrative Science Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2018): 479-525.
7. M.G. Franco, “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends” (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022).
8. J. Pillemer and N.P. Rothbard, “Friends Without Benefits: Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship,” Academy of Management Review 43, no. 4. (October 2018): 635-660.
9. L. Denworth, “Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond” (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020).