Dear Leader,
I trust this meets you in pursuit of leadership.
All offices are officially open for the year today, even though a few went on full gear last week.
As you resume work, make it a duty this year to make friends and show yourself friendly at work.
At our places of work, we mostly have colleagues, co-workers, team mates and the people who we work with, but we rarely have friends.
Yet studies have shown that people are more likely to stay longer in an organisation when they have friends there. I witnessed a personal example of this at my current place of work. We had an analyst who had two friends in the organisation, they were so close that they liked handling projects together. But two of them left the organisation (one for further study, and the other to a new career path) and so this analyst felt so lonely and she resigned in less than two months.
No matter how driven your colleagues appear to be at work, they enjoy having a friend or friends on the job. When a job is especially tough or maybe unpleasant, having a friend at work is sometimes the only thing a person can look forward to when coming to work, and when the job is good, having a friend at work can be the icing on the cake.
One part of this letter is encouraging you to make friends at work this year, but as a leader, the most important part of this letter is empowering you to be that friend at work people look forward to working with.
All of us do have friends, so this is not about telling you how to develop friendships. But sometimes when we try to study relationships at work, I found out that it can be so different from other ways we build friendships. The goal of this letter is that you make it a goal to be a friend, not necessarily to find a friend. One is proactive, the other is reactive.
It is easier, I guess, to develop friendship with someone if that person reciprocates your effort but if otherwise, you move on. Now, here is my point. You can’t afford to move on, if your goal at work is to build influence and grow your leadership. You should not easily give up on being a friend even with people who don’t initially respond.
So, how do we deal with such?
Like my previous letters on how to influence your leaders above you, pick some clues from it. Here are my thoughts:
- Start with listening. Listen more this year, listen to people at work to know them more, ask them certain questions about their lives and their work out of curiosity and listen to understand them and to connect with them. Remember, people differ. Leaders like you must understand and work around people’s differences this year.
- Find what both of you may have in common that is not necessarily work related. I have had friends at work and most of the time, what got us started as friends were things that are not work related. For example, we are both Arsenal fans. I realised that was an easier way I made friends in school years back. It helped us understand and get along even with work related matters.
- Go beyond 9-5: If you want friends at work, try to be available beyond normal work hours. Attend people’s birthdays, events, hangouts. Connect outside the office. It will go a long way.
- Avoid gossip. This is very important because I have experienced how this ruins friendships. They say “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about themselves and small people talk about others”.
Gossip really makes us small, so there is no upside to it. Friends don’t have to be gossipers. If you have a problem with someone, talk directly with the person and address it, not through a third party. Don’t join anyone to gossip about anyone at work.
This year has a lot of potential. It will require your commitment and the right attitude to produce results and establish your influence and leadership.
To wrap up the letter for the week, I recorded a new podcast episode for you titled “The Rules of Engagement for 2025”. Listen to it here
Till next week.
I’m rooting for you,
Great Owete
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