Modern working life means our jobs are less about what we work at, and more about the people we work with. Tasks have been subsumed by relationships. However important the skills are that you have mastered to do your job it will always help to have mastered “people skills” as well. Whether you b ind books, engineer washing machines, research early historical fiction or build bridges you will always be better off if you can also build relationships. The challenge of the modern workplace is to be a good colleague – someone people can build relationships with.
As we work away in teams and taskforces, departments and divisions, our working relationships bring us into ever closer intimacy with the rhythms of our colleagues’ lives. A missed morning reveals a story of burst pipes; unplanned absences alert us to ailing children; rings appear and weddings are planned; unironed shirts followed by new clothes and haircuts plot the dramas of the newly single; parents cause worry and are lost.
Indeed, we spend so long with our colleagues and know so much about them it can feel we know them like family and friends. This raises one of the conundrums of modern working life – does being a good colleague also mean being a good friend?
To answer this question we can contemplate a subtle distinction Aristotle makes in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle naturally celebrates the virtue of friendship, valuing it highly enough to devote two books to it. However, he also writes about the virtue of friendliness.
To be friendly is to be polite, engaged and respectful without, on the one hand, stooping to being obsequious or, on the other, remaining aloof and being surly. It is the virtue, in other words, of being easy to be around and straightforward to deal with. This would seem an ideal benchmark for being a good colleague who builds good relationships, yet stops short of friendship itself.
This is why we like colleagues who are interested, but who do not intrude and prefer those who rely upon us but are never a burden. The colleagues we admire are those who know that professional imposition is different to personal imposition; that the obligations of the workplace are not the obligations of friendship.
They recognise that work gathers people together through chance and that the bonds of happenstance are weak and should be easily broken – in sharp contrast to the strong and unbreakable bonds of friendship.
We should happily conclude, therefore, that a good colleague is not a friend. We should not see this as losing friendship, but as gaining true and friendly colleagues. Friendship is a great commitment we can only make to a few and can be a great burden. Friendliness is something we can offer to all and good colleagues do not burden us at all.
Nick Southgate will be leading the class 'How to be cool' on Wednesday 10 March 2010. For more information click here
great post.
for many years i've worked on my own, though i love to work in teams. braimstorm ideas, develop them and put them to work. i built a new "way of being" in the professional field, and now i'm back to work for a company where my team is actually only women. it's been quite tough to both adjust myself again to the colleagues circle as well as to bring a different approach to it. what i've taken for the last two months, since i started to work with this team, is that many people doesn't know the difference, therefore they're either friends or enemies, there's no space to even consider a change. and i believe if we all understand the difference between friends and colleagues we can work better in teams too (because that's another thing people don't quite understand what it means).
thanks so much for sharing this article.
Posted by: Space by Eliana Tomas | February 28, 2010 at 04:03 PM