The Business of Friendship

Making the Most of Our Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time

Shasta Nelson

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781400216970
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

It is virtually impossible to feel connected and supported in life when you don’t feel that way where you spend most of our time—at work.

In The Business of Friendship, friendship expert Shasta Nelson unpacks the distinct ways we can make work relationships the healthiest they can be, both for the sake of the employee and the mission of the company. She inspires readers to see why friendship is crucial to our health and our careers, and teaches us exactly how to develop the supportive and meaningful connections we need.

Our organizations benefit as friendships at work result in higher levels of workplace productivity, employee retention, safety, innovation, collaboration, and profitability. In having a best friend at work, we are seven times more engaged in our job, which translates to better customer service, less absenteeism, fewer workplace accidents, and more loyalty to our organizations.

Through Shasta’s stories, research, and practical guidance, she: 

• Breaks down what creates healthy bonds and reveals the 3 requirements necessary in all healthy relationships and teams.
• Helps managers and employees assess the health of their relationships and learn ways to repair and improve them.
• Provides advice for addressing some of the biggest fears around workplace friendships, such as increased drama, favoritism, confidentiality, gossip, toxic coworkers, relationship with bosses, and potential romantic attractions.

The Business of Friendship is for those who are ready to maximize the two most significant factors of our wellbeing—career and relationships. Whether you are a leader or an employee, when you feel more connected and supported at work, everyone wins.

PART 1

Why Relationships Matter at Work

1

How We Benefit from Friendships at Work

Allyson confided in me that “even though nearly everyone else who works here is a millennial like I am, it’s having the opposite affect I had hoped.” She had gone into a job at a magazine, eight months prior, thinking that being surrounded with people in a similar life stage would help her make friends. But instead of the resonance she expected to feel, she confessed that it felt more judgmental and competitive as they all seemed to feel pressure to outdo each other. “It’s almost like we each have to magnify our differences, no matter how small they are, to convince the powers-that-be that we are each the coolest and most reliable representation for our generation!” Her exhaustion in trying to stand out left her wondering who her people were, if not her age group.

Similarly, Drew expected to feel an instant camaraderie when he joined a team of engineers in Austin. While, for the most part, they had a lot in common—mostly men, engineer backgrounds, transplants to Texas, and similar temperaments—he was quick to assure me that while they were all nice, he had no idea how to connect with them. “It’s pretty quiet in the offices,” he said. “Everyone is polite and friendly, but they all seem eager to do their work and go home.” With most of their energy and skills being devoted all day to strategic thinking, problem solving, and data analyzing, they weren’t naturally prone to prioritize connection and getting to know one another. He wondered if his choice in profession doomed him to a career surrounded by people who were “in their heads all the time.”

On the opposite side of the spectrum, in a workplace filled with Ping-Pong balls, music, free lunches, and hosted happy hours, Prisha wasn’t having much luck either, despite what seemed like obvious commonalities with her coworkers. “We all chose to move here to the Silicon Valley, so you’d think that choice alone would basically self-select people like me—ambitious, business minded, progressive, highly educated, and committed to social change—and ensure that we could all be friends if we wanted?” She ended the sentence with the heightened sound of a question mark, basically begging me to agree with her. But my answer was unimportant because it couldn’t change the fact that while she felt grateful for what seemed like a cool job, all the perks in the world weren’t producing the relationships that made her feel like she belonged.

When we interview for a job, whether we do it consciously or not, we are looking around and asking, “Are there people here like me?” For as much as we might want to stand out, we also want to fit in because we assume that will lead to us feeling like we belong. In Chapter 3 I’ll share what actually does lead to belonging—if not just being around people who are similar to us—but first let’s understand why it matters so much.

Belonging is one of the, if not the most, basic human needs we share. One of the foremost authorities in the world on the study of social neuroscience, Dr. Matthew Liberman, goes so far as to say, “Maslow had it wrong.” In his reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which traditionally puts things like food, water, and shelter as the foundation of basic human needs, Dr. Liberman says in his book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, that to get it right we have to move social needs to the bottom of the pyramid because an infant actually cannot get food, water, and shelter without being in a caring relationship. He says, “Love and belonging might seem like a convenience we can live without, but our biology is built to thirst for connection because it is linked to our most basic survival needs.” In his study of the brain, he concludes that every other need we have is built on the bedrock of our relationships.

Unfortunately, too many of us lack that bedrock.

WHAT IS LONELINESS?

Despite the stigma, loneliness is not about being a recluse or hermit, has nothing to do with social skills, and isn’t a reflection of whether someone is liked or admired. It is not the same thing as being alone, living alone, or preferring alone time. It doesn’t even have to do with how many friends someone reports having. Loneliness is the perception that we are not known, supported, or loved as much as we want to be. It’s wanting more belonging than we currently are experiencing.

Loneliness can occur from lack of interaction, but for most of us, especially those of us in the workforce, our loneliness stems more from lack of intimacy. In fact, most of us know plenty of people, are more networked than we’ve ever been, and can spend most of our time serving people or being around them—and yet we’re still reporting loneliness because those interactions don’t feel meaningful. It’s often less about needing to know more people and more about wanting to feel known by the ones we’ve already met. That’s why we can sometimes feel the loneliest at our company holiday party or come home peopled-out after a long day of customer service but still be dying from loneliness.

But loneliness isn’t inherently bad. The feeling of loneliness is simply our body’s way of telling us that we have more capacity in our lives for more connection. It’s only bad if we ignore it. I love how Dr. John T. Cacioppo—one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, who studied and wrote on loneliness before his recent death and is the author of the book so aptly titled Loneliness—likens the experience of loneliness to hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. Just as hunger pangs inform us that we need to fuel our bodies, a dry mouth reminds us to hydrate, and yawns can motivate us to get the sleep we need, feeling lonely means our body is working well as it informs us that we function best when we feel seen and supported.¹

Our goal then isn’t to never feel lonely, just as we don’t need to avoid ever feeling hungry, but rather it is to more quickly identify what that loneliness means and how we can go about getting that need met in healthy ways.

But before we can get the need met, we have to realize we have the need.

WHO’S LONELY?

So, if loneliness is the feeling of not having the relationships, or interactions, that we want, we can clearly see that all of us are prone to feel it at times. The bigger question then is how many of us are feeling this absence more regularly without being able to respond to that hunger with meaningful connection when we need it. While it’s a hard feeling to admit or measure, researchers have been diligent in recent years to help quantify an experience that can feel somewhat subjective.

One of the leading voices in giving numbers to this feeling has become Cigna, who surveyed more than twenty thousand U.S. adults two years ago and concluded then (using the UCLA Loneliness scale, which is the highest standard in the industry) that, indeed, “most Americans are considered lonely.”² Unfortunately, this year they followed up with a report revealing that our numbers have only gone up in that short time—we’re now at 61 percent of us scoring as lonely, compared to 54 percent just two years ago.³

More specifically, that translates to almost 40 percent of us not feeling like we have close personal relationships with other people, more than 50 percent of us feeling alone or left out often, and nearly 60 percent of us not feeling like anyone knows us well. More extreme, about a quarter of us report that we rarely, or never, feel close to anyone and believe that no one understands us.

If we indeed need connections with others like we need food and water, then roughly half of us are socially malnourished, and a quarter of us are starving. Add to that number all of us who are just hungry for more nourishing relationships with the people we call friends, and the vast majority of us could do with greater social health. The human need to be seen, to be understood, to be known—by at least someone—isn’t being met in the way we’re now living our lives.

Unfortunately, that loneliness doesn’t automatically disappear when we get to work. While the Cigna report shows that the majority of us are satisfied with our relationships at work and tend to be less lonely if we’re in the workforce, nearly one in three of us nonetheless reports feeling disconnected from others while at work or the need to “hide our true self” at work. By another count, Imperative, a peer-coaching platform, reports that 49 percent of us feel we lack meaningful relationships at work.⁴ And when I asked, “Do you ever feel lonely at work?” while only about 20 percent of us feel it frequently, nearly 60 percent of us admit to feeling it at least half the time.

	Never	Sometimes	About Half the Time	Often	Always
Overall Average	12%	27%	40%	18%	3%

This lack of social health in our workplaces isn’t just in the United States either. Research out of the UK shows 60 percent of employees there suffering from loneliness at work,⁵ and a recent report in Australia puts them at 40 percent.⁶ Those aren’t small nu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Research and References
• Introduction: Why We Need This Book
• Part 1: Why Relationships Matter at Work
• Part 2: What Makes All Relationships Actually Work?
• Part 3: How to Make Relationships Work Better for Us
• In Closing
• About Free Bonus Chapter
• Advice for Managers
• Resources and Ideas for Friendships at Work
• Notes