I’ve mentioned before, I think, that I changed schools a lot when I was a child. When I lived in Tucson for five years, I went to three different schools. The first one was across the street from the rental house where we lived until our old house sold and my parents could buy a house. The second was an experimental school that my mom wanted me to go to. The third was the Catholic school near our house because mom got embarrassed that I hadn’t learned my times tables by third grade in the experimental school; so she moved me to the Catholic school.*
Anyway, I ended up with several sets of friends: a friend from the first school; friends I made at the third school; and friends from my neighborhood. Interestingly, one of the kids from the neighborhood also went to the Catholic school but when we were at school, we didn’t hang out together. Only when we were at home. We didn’t even walk or ride our bikes to school together. And then I had friends at school that I hung out with as a group – the girl scouts/songleaders group – and other friends that I hung out with 1:1, mostly outside of school, like Shawn, or like Lisa. Lisa lived around the corner from me; we babysat together; but we didn’t hang out at school and she wasn’t part of the neighborhood gang.
When I turned 12**, I decided that, for my birthday party, I should have 12 friends over for a slumber party. Actually 11 slumbered and one – the boy next door – came for swimming, cookout, and the movie, slept at home, and then came back the next day for pancakes and birthday cake.
The party was a complete disaster. My friend groups hated each other. The girl from the 1st school didn’t know anybody and kind of hung onto me; she also belonged to a big born-again megachurch, which my Catholic friends didn’t get. Shawn was a year ahead of us all in school so was older and more mature, and the girl-scount/songleaders didn’t understand why I had invited her; and she didn’t understand why I would want to hang out with those babies. Everybody thought the boy next door was cute and wanted to flirt with him; he didn’t understand why I was being so girly – couldn’t we go jump our bikes over the improvised ramps made out of found boards and bricks by David’s house?
The lesson I should have taken from all of this was the lesson that I took from Tom Rath’s Vital Friends the first time I read it: all your friendships don’t have to be the same. Throughout your life, you will have different kinds of friendships with different kinds of people. You will have shopping buddies, people who will love to spend a day going from shop to shop finding the perfect dress or shoes or book or whatever. You will have work friends, who you hang out with from 9-5, have lunch with, solve problems with, maybe grab a happy hour with. Then there are friends you make at school or grad school, who you share a learning experience with, maybe a professional interest. Or friends you watch sports with. Or friends that you meet through your family, friends you meet through your place of worship if you do that kind of thing. Friends who you call when you need a shoulder to cry on. Friends who will storm the capitol with you or stop you from storming the capitol or stand with you as you protest storming the capitol.
And each of these friendships can be different. Your shopping buddy may not want to be a shoulder to cry on. Your political buddy may not want to have lunch and hang out. Your work friends may come politely to your birthday party but may not ever reach out when you stop working there. Or you may find a gem who does. Rath describes different kinds of friendships and how to be a good friend in each of those different kinds of relationships.***
The next time I read this book, I took something different from it. That’s the thing about a good business book – or perhaps I should just say a good book – each time you read it, you take something different from it.
Because this is positioned as a business book, a good portion of this book is about making friends at work – a topic that is becoming more important now that making friends at work has become so much more complex.**** Tom Rath is one of the Gallup guys, and he uses their data to support his theories about friends at work – such as, if you have a “best friend at work,” someone who cares about how you’re doing as a person not just professionally, someone you have lunch with, who you enjoy hanging out with, someone who you love to brainstorm with about how to change the world, you’re seven times as likely to be highly engaged in your work. It does make it so much more enjoyable; working without a friend like that is very lonely. I think so much of what is driving people to job-hop right now is this feeling of loneliness: humans are social animals, if we don’t feel socially engaged, we feel unsatisfied at work. Covid drove a truck through that and the recent glut of layoffs that crosses all industries has made it even worse. There’s a “just do your job, collect your pay, don’t let them sucker you into getting attached” vibe out there. And it’s not a problem companies are going to solve with Wellness Wednesdays and pizzas.
If you’re wondering how to make a friend at work, Rath covers that as well. This is helpful when you’re starting somewhere new and trying to figure out how to fit in. It was one of the things I loved about the organization where I am working now: when I first started working there, everyone ate lunch together. Well, not everyone, but they catered lunch in so we all kind of ate at the same time, every seat in the lunch room was full. You could take your choice of which person to sit with and you got to meet and talk with people from all over the company, from all levels. One day I might sit with the CEO. The next, a lawyer. The next, an entry level video editor. I got to know everybody – it was great!*****
And then, three months almost to the day after I started, we were all working from home. Boom. We tried to schedule some Zoom lunches but watching people chew on-screen is very different from sitting around a table with them. Now we’re back in the office 3 days a week but the idea of a shared catered lunch in huge trays doesn’t seem normal anymore. The company orders individual lunches in and most deliveries arrive at the same time but people rarely eat in the lunch room – they grab their lunch and eat at their desks or go for a walk, eat in the park. The executives never eat in the lunch room anymore. A small group of us eat together almost every day and a colleague who doesn’t join asked me the other day, “Like, what is with you guys, huh?” like it was something weird. Culture change.
I was telling someone this week that I used to get mad, as a young manager, when employees left my team. Whether they transferred, got promoted out of my department, moved away, took a new job, or I had to let them go for performance issues, I felt abandoned and it made me angry (and sometimes, I admit, mean). Then I witnessed a peer ghosting one of their employees during the two-week notice period, and I saw how bad it made the employee, a person, feel. And I decided the abandonment thing was all about me. So then I made it a point to celebrate with people when they moved on. Congratulate them. Wish them well. I felt better and they did, too.
One of the gifts I often give employees who are leaving is a copy of this book.
Helpful as they start to make friends in their new job. Helpful to remember the friends that they made at their old job.******
*Catholic because the people I embarrassed her in front of were my father’s family, who were super-Catholic and had made her sign an agreement before she married him, promising to raise us as good little Catholics. Only when he came back from Vietnam, he had decided religion was BS, and so she figured the agreement didn’t hold. She found out that his family disagreed and was too nonconfrontational to stand up to them. And there was that thing about the times tables that kind of pulled the experimental school leg out from under her.
**I think this happened when I was 12 but, to be honest, it feels like everything that happened in Tucson happened when I was 12. I never find myself saying, When I was 11 or when I was 10. Something happened when I was 12, and so I remember everything that happened in Tucson with that age.
***But none of your friends will actually read the draft of your book on how to manage projects and change for non-project managers that you share with them. C’mon guys!
****Time for an update, Tom, based on how to do this in a remote-work / hybrid sort of world.
*****Getting to know everybody is kind of my vibe. It’s how I succeed. I’ve been known to introduce myself to people in elevators. I’m not as good as cousin, Pam, who could walk into a restaurant, five minutes later have everybody singing together, know their names in 10 minutes, and go home with at least one new best friend. I miss Pam.
******p.s. Oh by the way, although I think Rath never mentions the word in his book, this thing about making friends – some people call it networking.
Change+Management 