That's What Friends Are For
Despite the sinister deep baritone of Bill Lee’s voice (singing the part of Sher Khan in the first Disney version of 'The Jungle Book') joining the last line of the song that titles this column, we cannot but help nodding our heads in agreement at the sentiment the verse expresses:
Keep smiling, keep shining,
Knowing you can always count on me, for sure,
'Cause I tell you, that's what friends are for.
For good times and the bad times,
I'll be on your side forever more,
That's what friends are for.
At the cost of disappointing animal-loving readers, we must now move on to human friendships. It has been common knowledge for people who study human behaviour under the most testing of conditions – those of war – that it is not some grand patriotic purpose that drives heroic deeds.
A systematic study by the US military pinpointed the precise link that made for morale, resilience and, sometimes, heroism. It was the special friend or buddy. "… [A] primary aspect of the social system of the platoon was a network of interpersonal linkages. Everyone was a buddy, but one man was usually more so… [A] set of norms that seemed to guide the behavior of buddies can be formulated. First, a buddy had to 'understand' in a deeply personal sense. Buddies became therapists to one another… Second, although one man might think of another as a buddy, he seldom stated it publicly or boasted of the attachment. Only when the chips were down would his choice be displayed… Third, buddies did not boast of individual combat skills or compare combat proficiency. To do so was to suggest that obligation to the organization was more important than loyalty to one another… Fourth, buddies never put one another on the spot by demanding a choice between loyalty as a buddy and obligation to the organization as an infantryman… Finally, in a crisis and if forced to make a choice, a man would think first of his loyalty to a buddy, and second of his obligations to the organization.1
Just like an army squad, people employed in business organizations can’t choose who they’ll rub shoulders with and, consequently, what the selection-set will be from which they can pick their friends. In both cases, though, the very fact that they spend most of their waking hours with a limited group of humans, makes it likely that one or two of them will become special buddies and these will sacrifice more for each other than for their mission.
Smiles that the title of this column elicited are becoming distinctly artificial as smart readers infer where it is leading. Is the heart-stirring purpose extracted from the promoter’s thoughts or the Crispin-day clarion-call by the CEO not enough to enthuse employees? Not even though it’s backed with (at least for the top echelons) incredibly lucrative incentives? Can it be true that employees will not dedicate their lives for their company but for some odd friend?2 Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to jettison Purpose and Payments but Pals certainly need to be added to the mix. This column will examine why and how.
What is Friendship?
In evolutionary terms, friendship is a funny fowl. To understand why friendship is so peculiar we need to know more about the roots of human cooperation. "Our breathtaking ability to cooperate is one of the main reasons we have managed to survive in every ecosystem on Earth."3 But why do humans cooperate, sometimes even at great cost and risk to themselves?
An obvious reason for bearing the costs of cooperation is to help others who can propagate the genes we ourselves possess. To take a gene's-eye view: "A gene, in effect, looks beyond its mortal bearer to the potentially immortal set of its replicas existing in other related individuals. If the players are sufficiently closely related, altruism can benefit reproduction of the set, despite losses to the individual altruist."4 Curiously enough, lack of matching selfish genes doesn’t prevent friends from providing the same or higher levels of self-detrimental aid which evolutionary biology tells us to expect from our kin.
Since there aren’t enough kin to manage all the human interactions needed for complex societies, evolution has created the mechanism of reciprocal altruism. "Reciprocal altruism can also be viewed as a symbiosis, each partner helping the other while he helps himself. The symbiosis has a time lag, however; one partner helps the other and must then wait a period of time before he is helped in turn… Reciprocal altruism in the human species takes place in a number of contexts and in all known cultures… All these forms of behavior often meet the criterion of small cost to the giver and great benefit to the taker."5 Vital as the Tit-for-Tat strategy has been for human progress, in its crudest form it is inadequate for life-or-death situations (or even a fun night without having to worry about who will pick up the tab) when there is no time to negotiate or compute 'the balance of accounts or the shadow of the future'.6
Robert Wright conveys another problem with reciprocity: "Whereas with kin selection the 'goal' of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation… [W]hen we can look nice without really being so nice, or can be profitably mean without getting caught – don't be surprised if an ugly part of human nature surfaces. Hence secret betrayals of all gradations, from the everyday to the Shakespearean."7
It is in the breach in reciprocal altruism created by calculation and potential deception that true friendship steps in. "Friends’ relative insensitivity to past behaviors and future payoffs fits experimental and observational data. But it is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective that emphasizes survival of the fittest."8
Obviously, friendship is not the losing strategy the previous two paragraphs have made it out to be. In fact, its pleasure and profit are recognized in every culture around the world. Perhaps the universal portion of the concept can point us to its evolutionary survival and success. "… [P]eople see friends as people they can trust to offer help, to care for them, to look out for their interests, and to make sacrifices in times of need… As one peels away those aspects of friendship that travel poorly to other societies, a core pattern is revealed that consistently appears in descriptions of friendship across a range of societies. Friends help one another in times of need, and they do so predominantly because they feel positive emotions toward one another."9 Thus, friendship provides the hair-trigger helpfulness associated with kinship without being kin as well as Tit-for-Tat on a never-never plan quite alien to cold reciprocity.
Benefits of Friendship to Organizations
Our limited interest, of course, is in the very significant benefits organizations gain when their employees have buddies and, better still, best buddies at work. Three of the most important of these are productivity, emotional well-being and capability enhancement.
Productivity and agility of response can be directly traced to the degree of trust within a working team. Not all trust has to have friendship as its foundation but the most robust forms of it do. Impersonal, minimal trust that is essential to keep the component cogs of society working together with low friction is well captured by Francis Fukuyama. "Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community."10
At the other extreme is the trust Damon had while volunteering to stand hostage in place of his friend Pythias, knowing full well that, if the latter did not come back within the appointed time, Dionysus would have Damon executed in his place. To get back to a military example: "This is not simply trusting in the competence, training, or commitment to the mission of another soldier, but trusting in someone they regarded as closer than a friend who was motivated to look out for their welfare… In the words of one infantryman, … 'If you are going to war, you want to be able to trust the person who is beside you. If you are his friend, you know he is not going to let you down…. He is going to do his best to make sure that you don’t die.' Once soldiers are convinced that their own personal safety will be assured by others, they feel empowered to do their job without worry."11
Workplaces may not be as fraught as the court of Dionysus or an actual battle zone but there could be times when one needs to trust one’s corporate life in the hands of a friend. That pool of goodwill remains even when pressures are not so killing. The consequential lowering of transaction costs and increase in speed of response makes for much higher efficiency and quality.
The fountain of emotional well-being is the fun people get while working.12 Immediately outside the circle of enriched work and supportive supervisors lies the company of people that are present when one works. The joking, teasing, encouragement and appreciation of one’s colleagues in general and friends in particular can make all the difference between a care-worn and frazzled slog and a cheerful and bubbly work experience that makes the next day eagerly anticipated rather than dreaded.
More crucially, it is when work is tedious, pressures become intolerable and supervisors start acting as if they were Circe’s creation, that friends can save emotional balance and, sometimes, even life. Friends can "… be an invaluable first source of comfort and even some rudimentary counselling when the going gets stormy. A friend who is sensitive to an approaching breakdown can either insist the hesitant individual seek help or personally take on the task of talking to HR or up the hierarchy, circumventing the pressure creator. S/he can also alert the individual’s family."13 Friends can thus save costs of work disruption, medical and counselling care as well as reputational disasters.
Growing capabilities permit employees to face up to greater work demands. Friends can create such competence. "A close friend at work can provide tips and tricks for dealing with tough tasks and beastly bosses."14 At an even more basic level, friends are an extra pair of willing hands and just their presence can buck up individuals – even those over-burdened with meaningless and monotonous work. Finally, the network access friends have can open new avenues for guidance, exerting influence and career progression.
Guardrails for Best Friends
All powerful technologies, medicines or relationships need careful handling. Friendship is no exception. Subjecting it to scrutiny is particularly challenging because it is premised on suppressing the reciprocation checks of other non-kin relationships. All the same, much can be gained by exercising discretion before Selecting friends, being sensitive to the Strains on the bond and not altogether ruling out the possibility of Severance.
Friendships start relatively spontaneously but there is a period, somewhat like probation after starting employment, when amiability has to coalesce into friendship and then close friendship. This is the time to put work-friends through the same criteria that we have used for justifying friendship in the previous section. For productivity and quality, recall how some school friends encouraged you to strive more, study harder and achieve, while others dampened your enthusiasm for work. It is the former that contributed to your academic success. The same 'sniff' test must be activated before investing behind work-friend Selections.
Confirmed friendships can undergo unintended strain when the scale of the work-canvas and the associated payoffs grow hugely, life and career choices place friends in opposing camps and when sycophants find it worthwhile to exercise their termitic talents on one, other or both. Beyond a point, it is better to recalibrate gradually such friendships and moderate them into amiable acquaintanceships rather than keeping on applying araldite till there is a catastrophic failure.
A few situations demand a clean cut even if it doesn’t progress to hostility. These usually relate to one friend exploiting the other’s networks, moving to a never-ever reciprocity exchange or using the protection of non-retaliation to humiliate the benefactor. It is up to each individual to decide how many such 'strikes' s/he will tolerate before severance. My own limit is three but then I am a patient man (i.e. I convert friends who cross me into patients!).
What Organizations Can Do
This is all wonderful but surely friendships grow as naturally as do fauna in a forest and organizations cannot be responsible for their (pro)creation and progress. Let’s follow the animal analogy further to discover what companies should, and (more importantly) should not, do if cordiality at work is to congeal into friendship. Imagine a forest officer who permits, say, any tiger to stay only for a few days in a territory before packing it off to another reserve or even to a zoo. Or one who segregates tigers by gender into different parts of the reserve. Or who permits endless profitable safaris to disturb the tigers, thus preventing them from planning baby tigers. The wildlife under his charge is hardly likely to multiply. An organization’s friendship-friendly agenda should now be clear.
Opportunities for affect: The first and obvious prerequisite for friendship to develop at work is a significant period of time spent together. A temporary, gig, or contracted workforce is obviously least conducive to the building of lasting ties, quite apart from its other handicaps.15
Organization of work: Being in the same group over a sufficiently long period is a necessary but not sufficient condition for friendships. If work demands are so high that not a minute is available through the workday for exchanging pleasantries and gossip with the person at the next workstation, buddy bonds are most unlikely. Hence, apart from sustained co-working, a degree of slack in work expectations is also needed for friendships at work. Work organization which requires team interaction as part of the process is ideal for building friendships with the minimal toll on efficiency. Doing so when the team is first put together, is even better.
Off-work options: In addition to these enabling policies, companies can provide congenial atmospheres for employees to share coffees, meals, work-outs and hobbies. Is it realistic, expecting people to play billiards, push weights and participate in book or photography clubs in addition a full workday – even if that is limited to 8 hours?16 This is where we need to replay the last line of that Jungle Book song. This time Mowgli joins in and his squeaky voice can be clearly heard shouting: "That’s what sixers are for". Mowgli, fortunately, did not play cricket. So the sixer he refers to is the six-hour workday.17
Notes:
1. Roger W. Little, Buddy Relations and Combat Performance, in Morris Janowitz, ed., The New Military: Changing Patterns of Organization, Russell Sage Foundation, 1964.
2. Holy Bible, King James Version, John 15:13.
3. Martin A Nowak and Roger Highfield, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, Free Press, 2012.
4. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Co-Operation, Penguin Books.1990.
5. Robert Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers, Oxford University Press, 2002.
6. Daniel J Hruschka, Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship, University of California Press, 2010.
7. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, Vintage, 1995.
8. Daniel J Hruschka, Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship, University of California Press, 2010.
9. Daniel J Hruschka, Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship, University of California Press, 2010.
10. Francis Fukuyama, Trust, Simon & Schuster, 1996.
11. Thomas Kolditz, Leonard Wong, Raymond Millen and Terrence Potter, Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War, Monographs, Books, and Publications, USAWC Press, 2003.
12. Visty Banaji, 'If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do', Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 237-244, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
13. Visty Banaji, Who killed dedicated motivation?, People Matters, 8 October 2024.
14. Visty Banaji, Who killed dedicated motivation?, People Matters, 8 October 2024.
15. Visty Banaji, Udta Udyog, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 351-354, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
16. Visty Banaji, Who killed dedicated motivation?, People Matters, 8 October 2024.
17. Visty Banaji, India Eagerly Awaits a Sixer, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 277-284, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
