What Are Workplace Buddies Worth?
A lot, which is why managers should be fostering friendships in the office
A GMJ Q&A with Tom Rath, author of Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without (Gallup Press, August 2006)
A good friend remembers your birthday, helps you move, and rarely misses a lunch date. But a vital friend, says Tom Rath, author of Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without (Gallup Press, August 2006) could halve your chances of dying of heart disease; speed healing; and reduce your chances of getting cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, and certain cancers. What's more, the quality of a married couple's friendship could account for 70% of overall marital satisfaction.
But what about vital friends at work? Executives and managers might be surprised to learn that employees who have best friends at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs -- and, if they have at least three vital friends at work, 96% more likely to be satisfied with their lives.
That's a lot for a few buddies to accomplish, unintentionally, over lunch every couple of weeks. But vital friends manage it because they perform some essential and very specific roles: Builder, Champion, Collaborator, Companion, Connector, Energizer, Mind Opener, and Navigator. (See "The 8 Vital Roles" at the end of this article.)
Rath arrived at these categories after studying the research on friends and friendship, then launching a massive study of his own -- which became the subject of Vital Friends. The book lays out Rath's findings and provides methods of examining and enriching friendships online, in person, in real time -- and in the workplace.
In this interview, Rath answers some important questions: How can companies encourage friendships in workgroups? Can bosses be friends with subordinates, and should they? How many friends do you need? Read on -- and share it with a friend.
GMJ: Is a vital friend someone who can give you all the emotional and psychological support you need?
Rath: No. There's no one friend who can do all that, and it sets the relationship up for failure if you expect someone to be able to. We studied a couple hundred elements of friendship and eventually narrowed it all down to eight vital roles: Builder, Champion, Collaborator, Companion, Connector, Energizer, Mind Opener, and Navigator. [See "The 8 Vital Roles" at the end of this article.]
QUOTE: The term friend itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity. Even the term good friend is overused.
We've found that certain people play very different roles in your life. It's unrealistic to expect the person you go to for sage advice also to be the person you go out and have a good time with. And it's unlikely that he or she will be the same person who's pushing you and motivating you to do more every day, like a coach or manager does.
But nothing I've seen suggests that you need eight different people filling those eight roles either. So it's not one person filling all eight, and it's not eight people -- it's usually a mix of people.
GMJ: Your book is called Vital Friends. What's a vital friend?
Rath: On different occasions, I've been introduced to someone who later typed me a letter, signing it "your friend." These are people who I would barely call acquaintances. And there are people who list hundreds of "friends" on social networking sites like MySpace.com.
So I think the term friend itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity. Even the term good friend is overused. Adding the word vital provides a clear definition of what we mean.
When we were looking at this in our assessment, and particularly in our surveys, we defined a vital friend as someone who either increases your overall satisfaction with life or increases your engagement at work. And that's where the subtitle of the book stems from: "The people you can't afford to live without." Because if someone's vital to your life, and they move out of your life, your overall satisfaction or engagement is going to dip.
GMJ: Lots of people are writing about friendship right now, but you dedicated thousands of hours and dozens of scientists to researching it. What sparked your interest?
Rath: When top scientists and psychologists talk about what's important to our overall well-being and how satisfied we are with our lives, the only thing that they all agree on is that social relationships are probably the single best predictor of our overall happiness. The quickest way to be a little bit happier and more engaged in your job is to spend some time thinking about developing closer friendships.
In a very broad sense, it's the most important thing for your life satisfaction, and in a work sense, it's extremely important that you have a best friend at work. Because if you don't, your chances of being engaged are one in twelve, which is just abysmal.
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