Transcripts

Tom Rath:
When people have a best friend at work, it completely changes the equation - and they're seven times as likely to be engaged in their job.

Tom Rath, author of the book Vital Friends…

Over the years there's kind of been a tendency to tell people that they should be careful about having close friendships at work. And of course there are legitimate risks - if you're dating your boss, that's probably a problem. But, overall we find that it's important that people do have very close friendships at work and that leads to people having more fun on the job every day and it's better for the company's bottom line as well.

Think for a moment about how good your relationship is with your manager at work - because, Tom says, it really has an effect on your work life.

When your manager primarily ignores you, the chances of your being just real angry and negative and disengaged in your job are 4 in 10. When your manager focuses on what your weaknesses are - things actually get better because even though they're criticizing you all the time, at least they're paying attention. So, then the odds go down to 2 in 10 that you'll be really angry. But, when a manager focuses on your strengths most of the time, then we find that only 1 in every 100 people that we study are really disengaged and negative in their job. So, it's pretty clear from our work that isolation or being ignored is about the worst thing that can happen to a human being.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.