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Co-Friends at Work Andy: From the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, this is Getting Ethics to Work, the podcast that tackles the trickier moral dilemmas that you might face in the workplace. I’m your host and Prindle Institute Director, Andy Cullison and with me is our producer, Kate BerryKate: Hello. For each episode of Getting Ethics to Work, we discuss a case and unpack the difficult and often hidden ethical tensions that can make it hard to get along with others at work. And by the way, case is just an ethicist word for story.Andy: Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that we are not lawyers and are not offering legal expertise, but as an ethicist, I can be your best friend. So, Kate, what are we talking about today??Kate: Today we’re talking about friendship in the workplace.?Andy: All right.Kate: We’ve got a case with a reception after work, maybe a restaurant down the street. And the boss, Mary, notices her two direct reports, Jim and Bob, discussing a vacation that their two families are going to take together soon.Andy: Ok, so they’re really close friends.Kate: Very close.Andy: Ok, and so what does, Mary’s the boss??Kate: Mary’s the boss.Andy: And so what does Mary say to Bob and Jim??Kate: Well, Mary is just curious with these, two guys, they both do good work, but she asks them if they think it’s really that good of an idea to be that close of friends at work.?Andy: What an awkward thing to say at a reception.Kate: She probably doesn’t have that many friends at work.?Andy: Probably not. Ok,?so that’s what Mary says, do Jim and Bob say anything??Kate: No, they’re sort of taken off guard and don’t really have a response to their boss coming up and saying “are you sure it’s a good idea for you guys to be friends?”?Andy: Ok, well, aren’t there studies that talk about whether or not this is a good or bad thing? Do, is the anything out there that they could have drawn on??Kate: Yeah, There’s actually quite a bit, although it does fall on either side. But in terms of positive things about being friends at work, it’s really good for communication. Teams of people that know each other well and consider themselves friends are more aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses and can, sort of, be a stronger team overall.?Andy: Yeah, and they can perform tasks better together than they would with just strangers or random acquaintances, right??Kate: Right, right. And, if people spend a lot of time at work, and it seems like the average American spends about 47 hours at work, they’re likely to have a better time. If their friends are there.?Andy: Yeah, that’s a long time to be hanging out with people that you’re not friends with.?Kate: And I think there are obvious benefits, I’m sure that most of us have felt that there are good reasons, maybe slightly self-serving, for being friendly at work. Right??Andy: Ok. Kate: There are things that if you do them at work, you’re more likely to get along better with people around you, but that’s different, maybe, than a deep friendship or going on vacation together.?Andy: Uh-huh, yeah, certainly. So, you said it’s kind of divided, what’s the, what does the literature, or what do people say on the negative side of this??Kate: In terms of more negative reasons, for not being friends at work, those have a lot to do with power dynamics.?Andy: Uh-huh.Kate: That even, being friends with your boss, or even a friendship between coworkers a promotion might interrupt that and make it awkward. Those studies talk about sharing information that might not be appropriate or that you wouldn’t want shared with your coworkers, some of these things have to do with chronic health issues, financial troubles.Andy: Uh-huh.Kate: That then, if your boss or someone who was promoted over you was then in charge of giving you a raise, that that would become complicated for them, because they know that you are having money difficulties.?Andy: Oh, ok.Kate: There was even some evidence that, bosses that are friends with their direct reports are respected less, not only?amongst the people who are actually in the friend group, that they maybe were less worried about impressing their boss, or always sticking to deadlines, or their boss gave them less critical feedback because they were friends, but also people who are not in the friend group, maybe thought that boss was less serious because they were friends with direct reports.Andy: I see. Ok, well that’s interesting. So, is it good to be friends with people at work or not??Kate: It depends. (laughs)?Andy: (laughs) So.?Kate: People are really divided on whether or not it is a good idea to be friends at work or not.?Andy: Yeah it does sound like they’re divided, but I’m, I’m starting to kind of wonder if they, if they really are that divided. You know, there’s, some of the language in what we’ve been looking at, the people who are opposed to friendship at work say things like, “be careful not to get too close,” right?Kate: Right.Andy: And, and that “too” is emphasizing, like, not that it’s bad to be friends, but there’s a particular kind of friendship that they might think is bad. And maybe if we were to sort of tease some of that stuff out, thinking about the nature of friendship, we might find that maybe Mary and Jim and Bob wouldn’t really disagree all that much if we started to process some of this. So, let’s get to work!?Kate: Ok, where do we start??Andy: Well, I like that phrase “don’t get too close.” That to me that indicates that somebody’s thinking there might be different levels of closeness and maybe even different levels or kinds of friendship and, and that’s actually an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle. He’s one of the first philosophers to actually write quite a bit on the nature of friendship.Kate: Ok.Andy: So, here’s, here’s the kind of short version of his different categories. So he, he thought there was a category like a really, kind of, transactional kind of friendship, he had this notion of a quote unquote business friend, right? Where you, you kind of have to be friends with someone because they’re your coworker.Kate: Ok, I’ve got some of thoseAndy: Yeah, (laughs).?Kate: Not here.Andy: No, present company excluded.?Kate: No, of course.Andy: So, but, but that’s the idea that you’re sort of being friends because it’s kind of convenient for you to be friends, and he thought that’s a useful kind of friendship, but it might be kind of fairly superficial and surface-y.?Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: And then he thought there were friendships that were sort of related to pleasure, these could be romantic kinds of friendships, or relationships, but they could also be, you know, Joe’s just a fun guy and I like being at parties when Joe’s around, because he’s hilarious.Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: And so you’re, you’re friends with someone just because they kind of bring a certain kind of joy to your life. And then he had this other kind of friendship, a really high-minded notion that he thought was kind of, like, the true end of friendship, which was a kind of virtuous friendship where friends had a shared set of values and were dedicated to helping each other live out those values and they were really thinking about sort of almost the moral improvement or moral development of each other, and it was a very high-minded kind of friendship.Kate: That does not sound like me and my best friends.?Andy: (laughs) That doesn’t sound like me and my best friends either, but, you know, even if we didn’t agree with his categories,Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: like, his particular categories, or his assigning of value to those categories, you might think, maybe there’s something to this idea that there are levels of friendships.?Kate: Yeah, no, that sounds right to me.?Andy: So, maybe we can kind of make sense of this dispute between Mary and Jim and Bob, if we try and unpack some of that. So, why don’t we start? Like, Kate, what do you think are just some examples of a really surface-y kind of friendship??Kate: Waving hello and smiling, at least in the US, asking someone how they are, I know that in other countries that they find it really annoying that Americans ask, “how are you?” and don’t really care about the answer.Andy: (laughs)?Kate: (laughs) Maybe doing small favors for one another, like, offering, “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee, do you want one?”?Andy: Right, ok.Kate: That’s not putting you out very much and you might hope that they would reciprocate.Andy: So, nice gestures, nice acts of kindness. Ok, so that’s, that’s sort of like in the being friendly kind of category.Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: So, what makes, or what, when someone goes beyond that, what, what makes someone a friend, what’s the next level of friendship??Kate: If, if you and a coworker really like the same TV show or the same sports team. I feel like I have some people like this in my life, that we only have one thing in common and that’s the only thing we talk about when we’re together.?Andy: Hm, ok, yeah.Kate: But they’re not, I mean, they can be wonderful people, but I wouldn’t call them my closest friends because we’ve only got sort of one point of common interest.?Andy: There’s some kind of bonding that’s happening there and you do feel closer to a person like that. Kate: Yeah.Andy: All right, so let’s call that level one friendship. So level one friendship is that kind of thing.Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: And there’s, there’s just some kind of bonding happening. So, so now we could start going deeper. So, so when I think of like a real good friend. A real good friend, tends to be, I guess, it’s almost like they make your interests, not like your interests in shows, but your like, your self-interests, what your goals are, what is good for you, they make what is good for you, in some way, good for them, right? So, if there’s something that is good for you, they make it a goal of their own, right? So, an example of a friend making another friend’s interests their own interests are when your friends are into things that you’re not into, yet you still show up to help them do that thing because it’s important to them. So, let’s say a friend of mine is really, really into raising money for a particular cause.Kate: Yeah.Andy: And I’m like, “yeah, that’s a good cause,” but you know, in it’s maybe raising money for an animal shelter, right??Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: That’s a good cause, but you know, I’d rather raise money for legal aid or the community foundation or, some, something else, right??Kate: Right.Andy: But you know what? This is my friend’s thing and because it’s my friend’s thing, I’m going to make it my thing so I’m there helping them, you know, walk the dogs, or clean out the shelter, or what, whatever is they do.Kate: Right, right.Andy: And then take actual joy in the fact that it’s been accomplished, right??Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: So, that’s a thing that I wouldn’t have cared about, wouldn’t have really stepped up to do, but, if my friend’s into it, because they’re into it, I’m into it.?Kate: Yeah. So, is something like that do you think appropriate in the workplace? Or are we getting, maybe, a little too close??Andy: That’s where I think you might start to see some problems. Because outside of work, you might think, “yeah, my friend’s interests are my interests.” Inside of work, your friend’s interests might conflict with your responsibilities as an employee of your organization.?Kate: Yeah, I can think of a couple examples of something like that. So, a friend might ask you to cover for them on a sick day, or to clock them in or out if they have already left or have not arrived yet. And because they are your friend, and you would want them to do the same for you, and maybe you understand that they’re going through something tough, you might do that thing.?Andy: Right, exactly. There’s a, there’s something about the actual nature of friendship,Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: that could run into tension with other job responsibilities.?Kate: Right.Andy: So what’s another kind of thing about friendship that’s important to deep friendships??Kate: I think something like emotional support, listening to complaints both little and big.?Andy: Yup.Kate: Yeah, just the, the work of hearing someone and helping them work through their problems.?Andy: Absolutely. Yeah, helping people with their issues. Is that a kind of relationship that in the workplace we would think would give us pause??Kate: I don’t know that personally I feel that it is, it was one I saw mentioned in a lot of articles as being perhaps a reason not to have close friendships in the workplace, because if you complain about your job, or the people around you that if you’re making those complaints with people from work they’re more likely to get around, they’re more likely to influence your friend working with you. So there was an example of someone complaining that they don’t really like their job, but then being promoted over their friend, and that being really difficult on their friendship.?Andy: You know, another aspect of friendship, now that I think about it, that I think is a pretty important part of a good, close friend, has to do with, with secret keeping.?Kate: Yeah.Andy: Right? You, your friends are the people that you share your secrets with. You have these things that are private to you, that you don’t want to share, and it’s a way of kind of inviting them into your mind in a way that you don’t invite as many people and so some people think this idea of sharing and keeping each other’s secrets is, like, a constitutive part of being a good friend.Kate: But that could definitely get messy at work.Andy: Exactly.?Kate: What if your deep, dark secret is you’re embezzling?Andy: Yes, right? Or you lied on your resume??Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: Or you, as you said before, you really hate the kind of work you’re doing??Kate: Yeah.Andy: You don’t trust your boss, to do good work, right??Kate: Yeah.Andy: All these kinds of things. So, you could imagine sharing these kinds of deep secrets with someone and then, like, what if they become your boss one day or,?Kate: Right.????Andy: or they get in a situation where that information, they know it’s not in the company’s best interests, right??Kate: And either way, with that information you’re torn either between your friendship and what’s doing best for your workplace.?Andy: Yeah.?Kate: And that I think goes right into another really important characteristic of friendship, which is loyalty.?Andy: Oh right.Kate: That would probably be one of the most important characteristics that most people would attribute to a good, good friend, right? Is that someone who, if they screwed up, would give the benefit of the doubt, would have sort of unconditional regard for them, in a way that might not be appropriate for the workplace.?Andy: There is kind of, it’s not that we have to, like, ignore our friends’ faults.?Kate: Right.Andy: Or, you know, never do something that goes against their interests, but, you know, as you said, giving them the benefit of the doubt.?Kate: Or, especially if they mess up, maybe forgiving them and, and continuing to be in their company. And, and I mean, it would depend really on what happened, but that that is seen as a virtue, I think, for friend groups in a way that might be inappropriate in the workplace.?Andy: I’m sensing a bias toward “do whatever’s good for the workplace.”?Kate: You know, I noticed that. They were talking about, especially, keeping your salaries secret from your coworkers and I think that probably only benefits the workplace and might actually be a great help to someone who’s trying to negotiate a raise.?Andy: Let’s just go through these examples: like take interest alignment and self-interest, we, the conflict we came up with is suppose somebody wants you to clock them in early, right??Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: What’s the tension there between the duty of friendship? It’s the tension of aligning your friend’s interest with your own versus what’s good for the company, right??Kate: Yeah.Andy: The keeping secrets, again, what, what’s the tension there? It’s the tension of keeping secrets versus disclosing information to the company that would be in their interest to know, right??Kate: You know, I’m so glad you brought this up, because as we were going through these examples, I thought, isn’t it weird that there are conditions under which these friendship qualities are good, and conditions under which they are not good? And, maybe they’re only not good because it’s not ultimate loyalty to your workplace??Andy: Right, that’s curious to me.Kate: Yeah.?Andy: So, I think, we might be zeroing in on an argument that someone might give for thinking you can’t be friends at work with this idea of conflicting loyalties. Again, all the examples of ‘it’s bad to be friends” sort of led to tensions between your duties of friendship and what might be perceived duties to the company. Right??Kate: Right.?Andy: Ok, so, so imagine a case of individuals, let me, let me test out this argument.?Kate: Ok.Andy: So imagine a case of when it might not be ok to be friends with two people at the same time, and what I’m thinking is, imagine you’re friends with someone.Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: Call that person Tom.?Kate: Hello, Tom.Andy: And, Harry is really hostile to Tom’s interests. Harry’s almost like an arch-nemesis, or something, right??Kate: Yeah.Andy: Or, or, put it this way, Harry will always put his interests ahead of Tom’s interests.?Kate: Ok.Andy: You might think, you can’t be a friend to Tom and be aligned with his interests and a friend to Harry and be always aligned to his interests because, again, maybe Harry and Tom have never actually come into conflict, but you know Harry will always prioritize his interests over Tom’s.?Kate: Right.Andy: So you can’t really, you know, you’re going have to choose.?Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: And so you might as well just not get into that, just devote yourself to being friends to one of them.?Kate: Yeah.Andy: So maybe that’s what’s going on here and the idea is, if, if you’re supposed to be loyal to your organization, you can’t be loyal to your organization and friends with other people because sometimes that organization, like Harry, will expect things that are not in your friend’s interests.Kate: Right.Andy: Like, they’re going to expect, if they’re late, that they don’t get clocked in early by someone else. They’re going to expect if they miss sales targets that they don’t get the benefit of the doubt, right? Something along those lines.Kate: Yeah.Andy: Maybe that’s what’s going on? I’m truly trying to figure out, like, what’s going on behind all this “don’t be friends at work.”Kate: Because work wants to be your only and best friend.Andy: Yeah, exactly, (laughs) or it wants you to regard it as your only and best friend.?Kate: Yeah.Andy: That seems terrible.?Kate: Yeah, it also seems that it’s up to each person to either choose their work or their friends.Andy: Right.Kate: Right? Like, that it’s, it’s an individual choice, but either you are loyal to work, or you are loyal to your friends and sort of don’t expect to be promoted and just don’t do the things that you would be expected to at work.?Andy: To me this is one of the more interesting dilemmas where it just really isn’t clear. There’s clearly a lot of benefits to being friends with someone at work. There’s clearly a lot of potential complications that could arise. So to me, I think the best practical take away is to just be very intentional in examining what kinds of friendships you have in the workplace and keeping an eye out for the ones that cross over into those, those deep kinds of friendships.Kate: Yeah.Andy: You’re going to want to pay attention to really, really good friends who care about the moral improvement of each other, like Aristotle would say. You might even have to say, ok, you might have to come to some kinds of understandings, like, what happens if you or I put the other one in an awkward position with respect to workplace, like, you might need to come up with some, like, what do we do about that??Kate: Yeah, “how do I give you a performance review even though we’re best friends?”?Andy: Right, it may be. Well, here’s another interesting flip, we’ve been focusing very much on, “oh, if you’re friends with that person what happens if they screw up? What happens if I find out secrets from them that are against company policy?” We should flip that. It might be that if you’re friends with someone at work, you should be thinking very carefully, if you care about their wellbeing, to not put them in awkward positions, right? A good friend might not ask their friend to do something that would be awkward for them to do, right??Kate: Yeah.Andy: Maybe you asked them to tell a white lie for you outside of your work, but, like, what do they care? Right, like, so, like, example, you’re at your friend’s apartment, their ex calls and they’re like tell them I’m not here, right? Like, you don’t know their ex from Adam??Kate: Uh-huh.Andy: Or whatever, so you don’t really care. So it’s not an awkward position to ask them to help you in that kind of a thing.Kate: Right.Andy: But to ask them to do it in a work setting, like, maybe you’re doing something inappropriate as a friend. So, maybe one other practical take away is if you are going to engage in friendships at work, a good friend is going to be intentional about trying to mitigate the degree to which that friendship puts their friend in an awkward position.?Kate: And would watch and preempt any behaviors in themselves that might put someone else in this awkward position.?Andy: Yeah.???Kate: So, let’s imagine that Jim and Bob had been sitting with us the whole time and were able to listen in on our conversation. If they had all that time to craft a really good answer to Mary, what would they tell her??Andy: Based on what we’ve been talking about, I think there are few things they can say: one, they can note that there are degrees or kinds of friendship. And some of them seem like they’re perfectly ok in the workplace and, in fact, based on some of those studies we were talking about, you know, probably good for the workplace. But to acknowledge Mary’s concern, there are kinds of friendships where you might think, “ok, this could, this could get us into some weird territory.” And I think it’s those deeper, or higher forms of friendship that involve, you know, being more committed to the interests of your friends, where you’re, you know, feel pressure to be loyal to them, you feel pressure to keep their secrets for them, make their interests your own. If you’re in a friendship that’s like that with somebody, then I, you know, there is cause for concern. You, you run the risk of having felt loyalties, or felt obligations that could run contrary to what’s good for everyone else at the company.Kate: So, can you have a deep friendship with someone at work??Andy: Well, I think that’s an interesting question. We were just talking about how a really good friend would be good at not putting you in a position to where your loyalty to them would put you in an awkward position at work.Kate: Yeah.Andy: And, and maybe there’s something there, maybe, maybe you can have deep friendships, but maybe only if they are these. Well, here’s a view you could have: a view you could have is that those kinds of deep friendships are ok, but it would be better if they were kind of like what Aristotle had in mind about what really good friendships are, which is, you are aligned with the interests, you are loyal to your friend, you, you would be their secret keeper. But, you both are, sort of, allied around doing good. And if you are having that kind of friendship, then you might think you will not have times where duties of loyalty to your friend conflict, right? Because really good friends don’t always do whatever’s in their friend’s, you know, whatever their friend wants.?Kate: So let’s say Jim and Bob are trying to achieve a high Aristotelian friendship, what happens if they ever feel a moment of conflict between what is best for their workplace and what is best for their friend??Andy: They take a page out of Neville Longbottom’s book, right? (laughs)?Kate: (laughs) It’s from Harry Potter, for the few of you who probably don’t know.Andy: Neville Longbottom is the, like, prototypical Aristotle notion of friendship, right? So, at the end of, Kate: Sorcerer’s Stone??Andy: Yeah, when does he stand up to them, it’s at the end of Sorcerer's Stone.?And, they’re going to sneak out and Neville’s like, “no, you can’t do that. “I’ll, I’ll fight you,” or something like that.Kate: “Stop breaking the rules!”Andy: Yeah, Dumbledore rewards him at the end saying something like, you know, “it takes courage to stand up to your enemies, but it takes even more courage to stand up to your friends,” right? So, so the idea is, Aristotle didn’t think that friends would do whatever the other friend wanted. They’d be concerned about the well-being and virtue of their friends as well, and so they’d stand up to their friends, if their friends were doing something that they shouldn’t do because that’s what a good friend does. And so you might think, if you have that kind of friendship going on in the workplace that’s deep, then you’ll never have a situation where loyalty to your friend will conflict with another obligation to the workplace because, let’s take a secret keeping kind of thing. If your friend’s keeping a secret and you feel pressure to keep it secret from the boss, if it’s nefarious, you’d stand up to your friend and be like, “no, we can’t just keep this secret, I’m sorry.” But, if it’s something that the boss doesn’t have a right to, or if the friend is keeping a secret for privacy reasons.Kate: Or because there’s a bad policy.Andy: Yeah, a bad, unjust policy, you might think, “eh, it’s not bad to keep that kind of secret.” So at the end of the day, something like loyalty or secret keeping won’t ever really put you in tension with workplace obligations.?Kate: So, in fact, work may actually give you the opportunity to exercise a better kind of friendship that might make you a better person.?Andy: Right, (laughs) exactly, I mean you, at least, if you’re going to have deep friendships at work, it would be wise to have friendships where that’s a very clear understanding of the nature of the friendship is like, hey, you know, you could even lay that out there, right?Kate: And it might make you a more noble and wise person.?Andy: Yes, Aristotle and Neville Longbottom would be proud. Thanks so much for joining us as we try to Get Ethics to Work, I’m Andy Cullison.?Kate: And I’m Kate Berry, if you have a question about business ethics you’d like answered on the podcast, email me at katherineberry@depauw.edu and maybe we’ll talk through your issue on the air.?Andy: We hope you can take some of what we’ve discussed here and get it to work.??Kate: If you want to learn more about what we talked about on the show today, check out our show notes page at getethicstowork. That’s all one word, get ethics to work.?Remember to subscribe to get new episodes of the show, wherever you get your podcasts. But regardless of where you subscribe, please be sure to rate us on apple podcasts, it is the best way for us to meet new listeners??Getting Ethics to Work is hosted by the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. Our logo was created by SmallBox. Our music is by Blue Dot Sessions and can be found online at sessions.blue. Our show is made possible with the generous support of DePauw alumni, friends of the Prindle Institute, and you, the listeners. Thank you for your support. The views expressed here are the opinions of the individual speakers alone. They do not represent the position of DePauw University or the Prindle Institute for Ethics.?????????? ................
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