Work Friends vs. Real Friends. Do You Know the Difference?!
Is it just us or is “friends” a word that’s used way too loosely? We don’t know if it’s because Facebook calls people we connect with “friends” or growing up, the kids we hung out with at school automatically earned the title of friend, but a lot of us have gotten ourselves into drama because our friendship standards are not as high as they should be.
Take work friends vs. real friends. Have you ever thought to make a difference between the two? You need both. But if you start expecting people you do business with to have the same kind of loyalty as people who you have an emotional connection to, you could find yourself in a world of trouble. Unnecessarily so.
To spare you some of the problems we had to learn the hard way, here’s a cheat sheet on how you can tell the difference between who you should be cool with to get work done and who you should rely on to totally have your back.
1. Work friends have an end game in mind. Real friends have no agenda.
2. Work friends connect on a need-to-know basis. Real friends you can be vulnerable with.
Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with your work friends, sometimes you can spend a lot of time together. Whether it’s a plan for work or you’re an actor on set, there may be weeks where you see each other all of the time. Don’t let that cause you to believe you’re becoming best buds, though. Be friendly. Be engaging. Have fun. But you can’t really develop trust in a small frame of time. When it comes to sharing your personal business and being emotionally vulnerable, save that for the people who’ve proven they can handle it.
3. Work friends require strong boundaries. Real friends require few "walls".
Whoever told you boundaries are for people who are paranoid or unhealthy, they lied. So much drama can be spared when people set up boundaries. Basically, these are rules or standards that set the stage for how you want to be treated. People who respect you will honor those boundaries. People who work with you should. Real friends? Although you will need a few boundaries with them too, they tend to be more relaxed. They know you so well that they’re usually clear about what “your line” is. And they honor it.
4. Work friends are not always balanced. Real friends give as much as they take.
We already talked about the fact that work friends have an agenda. Since they're thinking about getting what they want, making sure you get what you need may not always be on their radar. That doesn’t make them a user so much as someone who you don’t need to build something intimate with. A lot of people get their feelings hurt, unnecessarily so, because they expect work relationships to be 50/50 when rarely is that the case. It’s your friends who want to make sure you’re not feeling taken for granted. That they are meeting your needs as much as you are meeting theirs.
5. Work friends may be seasonal. Real friends can last a lifetime.
Reason, season, lifetime. We’ve all heard that people come into our lives for one of the three. The tricky thing about work friends is sometimes the seasons rotate. Meaning, if there is a great chemistry and you have similar visions, you may work together on more than one task. But don’t expect consistency from those types of relationships. They come when you’re working and, 8.5 times out of 10, they’re gone once you’re done. Real friends? They are in it with you for the long haul. Good times and bad, thick and thin, no matter what…they got you. Make sure you hold on tight to those kinds of people. You’ll need them to help you to keep things in perspective while you’re working with your “other friends”. That being said, sometimes a work friend can eventually become a true friend, and that is something to be cherished but not necessarily expected.
