Friday 28 September 2012


"The F word" - Friendship at work


Friends In the western world, we hardly ever use the word "Friend" about our work relationships.

Colleagues, Associates, co-workers, but never F****ds. It's as if F*****d is a dirty word - the work-related F-word.

And yet, when we think about the relationships and the trust needed for knowledge sharing, and the social relationships we can build in Communities of Practice, is that so very far from Friendship? It's for a reason, that those contacts in Facebook are called Friends.

I was interviewing a guy recently, as part of a Knowledge Management Assessment and Strategy exercise, and he said to me "I might visit other managers that I know, to share my knowledge and help him achieve his targets. He is my friend, so I would help him".  And this quote, from an assessment of another company "If my friend's got a problem I can't leave him to work on it on his own".  Here's another, from a third company. "It is a very small group of people in the division in (Country), and most of us are good friends since university. We share our knowledge very openly".

None of these quotes are from North American or European organisations.

I searched through many of my documents for the use of the word "friend", and in the North American and European organisations, the word was used as part of the phrase "user-friendly" and as part of the cliché "phone a friend" (a reference to the Millionaire TV show). With one notable exception (Canadian) I didn't find any reference to friendship at work.

In the North American/European mindset, friendship at work is seen as a risk. See for example



And yet, as the quotes above show, friendship is a huge enabler for effective knowledge sharing and knowledge re-use. It removes the Not Invented Here barrier, and replaces it by "Invented by my friend".

So maybe we should stop looking at the risk and the downside of Friendship at work, and seek instead to help employees to build a wider social network of friends, as support for the behaviours and culture that Knowledge Management requires.

In fact, if we return to the person I first quoted, who said "He is my friend, so I would help him" - we asked this guy what would be the most useful thing the company could do, to encourage knowledge-sharing and re-use in the organisation. He replied

"I would like to meet other managers like me on a regular basis, have dinner with them, share knowledge in an informal setting, and become friends"

3 comments:

Hendri Ma'ruf said...

It would be nice to see the development of bringing the culture of friendship into office, in US and Europe. Particularly, in the context of KM.

Hendri Ma'ruf said...

It would be nice to see the development of bringing the culture of friendship into office, in US and Europe. Particularly, in the context of KM.

Albuquirky said...

Friendship involves reciprocal trust and lateral (colleague-to-colleague) loyalty. Many "leaders" I've worked with give lip service to 360-degree loyalty, yet their other actions and communications reveal their operational definition of loyalty to be one way--from subordinates to superiors. In the worst examples I've encountered, the leader has made clear that loyalty to him or her demands tolerating and reflecting his or her denigrating, fault-seeking, blame-pinning orientation toward my co-workers. In my 26-year experience in different parts of this firm, such attitudes in leaders have not been ubiquitous, but have not been rare. If this distrustful, dominating orientation is common among managers in America, work friendships are dangerous for employees.

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