Recently, I attended a talk given by a very accomplished and straight-talking career coach. She had retired after a full and successful career and then went into business for herself as a consultant a few years back. She clearly loves her work and her clients sing her praises. So when I had a chance to sit in on one of her workshops, I jumped at the chance.
However, during her presentation, she made a comment that brought me up short. She said that, while at work, you need to have boundaries (agreed), that you are hired to do a job and should be doing it (agreed) and that you should keep anything personal mostly tucked away (wait… huh?).
I find that I look forward to learning about my colleagues and that it provides me insights into who they are. I am genuinely interested in and care about their lives. Granted, this is a business you’re all involved in and you may be required to make difficult decisions regularly that could impact the people around you… but to isolate myself from those I spend roughly a third of my adult life with? That just didn’t seem right.
To be clear, our successful career coach wasn’t saying that you should cut yourself off entirely from your coworkers and never interact with them, but she felt strongly that any personal interactions should be kept to a minimum. When she retired, she shared that one of the best compliments she’d received was from a colleague who said that they’d really enjoyed working with her but that they felt like they barely knew anything more about her as she was retiring than when they first met.
Now, I realize a big part of this comes down to personal style. There’s also a healthy dose of self-protection and comporting yourself appropriately at work. By no means am I suggesting that you ever cross those lines. But I have found it invaluable to get to know the people I work with. It helps me relate to them and, as a manager, how to best approach and motivate them.
One associate of mine was the definition of a driver and they didn’t care for all the context and warm fuzzy stuff I would sometimes offer the rest of the team. Just tell them what we needed to accomplish and by when and then let them get to work. But I still found ways to connect and learned about their family, their aspirations for their career and challenges that they faced along the way. I think those insights made me a far better leader as I had context and understanding of what motivated them. Heck, it was those very insights that helped me understand why my style was sometimes frustrating them.
Conversely, there was another person who reported to me for a few years. They were very open about what they would do in their off hours and weren’t shy about sharing their opinions on a lot of different topics. Because they were so open, even with me, I got to know them better as a person and could work in coaching about what was appropriate for the workplace. No one had apparently talked to them about this before and so this was something they were blind to. But with the additional perspective, I was able to help them further refine their behaviors so that they were perceived as an even more valuable member of the team.
To me, listening and learning about my colleagues demonstrate my caring about them both as a person and as a coworker. Yes, you still need to have careful and well-defined boundaries that you maintain at all times. Case in point, I rarely went to lunch with my team save for group celebrations and I made a point of never showing of when I was frustrated or angry. Doing so can be a slippery slope.
Still, with all respect to my career coach friend, I don’t think I want to wall myself off from those I work with. I do make explicit decisions every day about what to share about myself and to be careful about knowing when it is time to step away or stop someone else from telling me too much from their lives. But with careful thought, I have found my work relationships are both more rewarding and have made me more effective than if I had kept to myself.
Two final considerations – first, you have to be genuine with those around you. Pretending to be someone’s friend or to care about people is not only wrong, it will eventually come back to bite you so be careful. Also, recognize that getting to know people will likely mean you need to spend extra time to do so. Work stills got to get done and so I often found myself staying later because I made time for my colleagues. Still, I always viewed it as an investment in my people and my network and those paid significant dividends over time.
This is an interesting topic with a fair amount of “fuzziness” in how people choose to act at work. If you’d care to, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks and know that I’m pulling for you!
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