Work friends

When does a work colleague become a friend? That is a question that I tried to avoid. For many years, during almost all of my working life, I was in a position of management. I started with a team of three way back in the early eighties and peaked in the mid-teens with over eleven hundred souls. I tried to get to know each and everyone of them, which obviously became harder as the numbers grew. I had many work colleagues yet not many friends.

Let me explain. I always felt and still do today that you should be very careful getting too close to people who you have some responsibility for. Should things go wrong, or if belts need tightening, it is much harder to make the right decision involving those people with whom you have had a close relationship. Friendship and effectiveness aren’t always related. What attracts you to someone as a friend is not necessarily what the business is looking for.

I would, therefore, in the main avoid going out with them for drinks and other social events. When it became an absolute must I would attend and make sure I left at an early opportunity. With the other managers it was a little different in that I would fraternise with them occasionally, though to be honest it was never my thing. Again friendship had its challenges as often those around you were competing in some way and this could be awkward in a political environment.

In my last role, I didn’t see myself as ‘the boss’ but rather as one amongst several people working together as equals yet that is not always the way that people saw me.

Now that I have left work, none of this matters and I am at liberty, under my own rules, to make friends with whom I choose. I don’t have colleagues anymore, just friends. We still meet and chat but this time as friends.

Some of them think I am still their boss!