Most people when starting in business have experienced, well-meaning family members or friends offering advice. The key is knowing which pieces of advice are helpful and which are completely wrong. Two pieces of dubious advice I received on friendship were as follows,
“Don’t geat too close to people that work for you, they will lose respect for you and the business will suffer.”
“You won’t have any time for friendships when you start the business, it’ll take all your time to keep your head above water.”
I disagree with both pieces of advice and have proved them wrong over the years. I am a better leader and own a better business because I have cultivated good friendships inside and outside the business.
Before coming onto the reasons for this, it seems that friendship generally is becoming a lost art and even the word ‘friend’ has been downgraded by social media. Proper friendships are essential to our thriving and flourishing as a human being, and indeed as a leader. It also seems that true friendship is something men perhaps need to work on far more than women, who generally have much better and closer friendships than men.
C.S. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves (re-printed by Collins in 2016), talks of four different Greek words for love: affectionate love usually for a child or a pet (storge), erotic love (eros), compassionate love (agape) and friendship love (philia). Lewis describes friendship love as side-to-side love whereas erotic love is face-to-face. Often deep friendships form due to an initial common interest or by aiming to achieve a common purpose i.e. facing outward on a task rather than inward on each other. Surely there are few places where this is truer than the workplace.
The anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, concluded in the 1990s that humans could only maintain social relationships with an average of 148 people and not surprisingly this was the average size of the early hunter-gatherer communities. His research broke down this figure into different layers where emotional closeness was considered. The layer closest to us has 3 to 5 people, the next layer 15, the third layer 40 and so on. This research fits in with the lives of the ancient mystics, who would have 12 to 15 disciples and often a closer group of 3 to 5 individuals within that number. So, when someone tells you they have over 1,000 friends on Instagram, don’t believe them!
We have established that it is good for us humans to have friends for our own wellbeing, but, as a leader, should these friendships be within your workplace or outside it? I would say having both creates a healthy balance. No doubt having friends outside the workplace is good for switching off and not thinking about work, but it is also only natural that we leaders form friendships within the workplace too. Forming friendships with those we spend 35+ hours a week with will happen, and it is also healthy and good for us to have close relationships outside the workplace when we can relax a little more.
One hundred years ago or more, the place where people had their homes was their predominant community and where their closest friends lived too. But the increased mobility due to transport led to some degradation of local community and the current epidemic of loneliness means that there is little local community for many of us, particularly city dwellers. The workplace is often the primary community outside their family, and bonds of friendship will form where people spend much of their time, whether that be a virtual or physical office.
Listen to this definition of friendship from the Urban Dictionary: “Friendship is when you love someone with every ounce of your being and genuinely want them to be happy even if it means sacrificing something yourself to make them happy”. Just imagine if a company was full of relationships like that, full of people whose purpose was to ensure the happiness of others. We would have very different workplaces and much more successful businesses.
There is lots of good data to suggest that the businesses with the happiest people are the most productive and most profitable. Have a look at the Sunday Times Best Places to Work lists and notice how many winners are amongst the most successful businesses in the UK. So even if your only motive is more profit, then a director or leader being a loving self-sacrificial friend to others in the business would be a good idea, although if that was your only motivation you would come across as not being authentic and you would be wasting your time!
So, what about a leader being a close friend to some of those in a non-leadership position in the company? This was what I was warned against when starting out. I do think there is a place for this. A good leader will always be looking at where the next leaders in a business or organisation are coming from, and I think being a friend (and mentor) to them is a great thing to do. Outside work good friends will challenge each other when they have a different point of view and hold each other to account if they are not doing what they have promised to do. How different is that to an accountable relationship in the workplace?
People trust real, authentic people and I strongly believe that leaders sharing their vulnerabilities with their team makes them a better leader and more able to be trusted by their team. For far too long leaders have not behaved like normal humans with real emotions and if people know leaders are people just like them with fears, emotions and concerns, more trust is engendered. There may be times when it is right to hold information back within the business, even from your friends there, but generally openness and transparency makes for a better, more positive company culture than those where decisions are made in darkened rooms.
Creating a culture of friendship within a business, modelled by the leaders, makes for a stronger organisation. And I would say that the opposite is true too, look out for people within a business who don’t have any friends, they may be the ones hindering your positive thriving culture. Look out for them and put your arm around them, but if they continue to isolate themselves from others, watch out!
Do you want to thrive in ’25? Cultivate good friendships that nourish you from both your work colleagues and outside your workplace. These friendships will make you a better leader and a more fulfilled, happy person.
