Friendships at the workplace- do they harm or help?

In a battle between organizational policy and human nature; human nature would always win. If you try and restrict social bonding at the workplace, you would eventually fail. The need for social bonding and relationships is very basic to every human being and will also surface at the workplace. A whole lot of studies have proven how having a network of friends at the workplace positively impacts outcomes such as customer service, safety incidents, sharing of information, suggestions and opinions etc.

Now, if we were to reverse the situation where overall engagement of employees at the workplace is very low, and performance on friendship parameters is very strong; does this mean that this social bonding at the workplace is working against the organizations efforts to improve employee engagement? Where all the conversations through all these informal channels is centered around how the organization is trying to cheat the employees and take away their bonuses or how the new guys are being interviewed to replace the old ones. The friendships at the workplace are getting stronger with common misery bringing everyone together to fight and crib against a common enemy.

A disengaged employee is like an irate customer, he/she is actively trying to spread his/her disengagement around the workplace and in the process garnering support from all others who share a similar feeling. Unlike an engaged employee who is busy working hard and contributing to building the organization, this disengaged employee is talking a lot more, enjoying longer coffee breaks and is creating more such partners in misery.

Social bonding at the workplace which can serve as a great source of bringing together the organization for achieving greater goals is now working against it with disengagement being the basis of most of these social bonds.

The failure of the organization to provide an enabling environment and local level managers to create an engaging work environment at an individual team level created this disengaging epidemic which is gradually spreading across the organization through these friendships at the workplace.

So what can an organization do to curb such a situation? Trying to curtail the relationships at the workplace would do more harm than good and would eventually lead to spreading of more negativity. The answer may lie in the basics of creating an engaging experience for every employee and hence provide more positive strokes to the conversations thereby using the informal networks to spread more positivity.

Our managers have to play a very critical role in ensuring that they are talking a lot more to their teams and keeping them abreast of what is happening in the organization to eliminate the impact of gossip on employee morale. This talking is about informing the employees about what's happening, why is it happening, hearing from them on what is troubling them and painting a true & fair picture for the employees. Nothing can replace an honest, regular dialogue.

While the most natural reaction would be to try and curb all informal communication, my suggestion would be to create opportunities for people to come together and share their thoughts, feelings and aspirations in a more conducive environment. This may actually help in steering these negative conversations in a more positive direction and create a more enabling environment at the workplace.

Another critical aspect will be to completely refrain from playing any kind of blame game in any given situation. Strictly avoid blaming anyone for anything that is going wrong at the workplace, for this may create a cycle of negativity and blaming which would further add fuel to the fire. You may want to talk to and hear from the trouble makers in private rather than use any kind of public medium to reprimand them. While you should use public platforms to recognize all sorts of positive behavior which has contributed towards creating a positive experience for employees and/or customers, thereby, encouraging more such behaviors.

Research has shown how friendships at workplace contribute to building a more positive and candid workplace where friends tolerate and work out disagreements better, cheer each other up in the times of trouble and are more committed to achieving the goals of the group. Thus, it is critical for an organization to encourage friendly relationships at the workplace rather than see it as a peril of having "people" at the workplace.

Unlocking world class performance-one individual at a time

Every individual is unique and is blessed with certain inherent strengths which when put to use in a suitable environment may help him/her deliver a world class performance.


Now, if we were to assess you for these inherent talents and strengths through some highly validated and recognized psychometric test or any other form of assessment tools. Put you in a role which was totally in line with the way your brain was hard wired i.e. complete and absolute match with your internal strengths. There is very high probability that you will be delivering a world class performance at work every day. If in a organization every individual was in such a role where he/she was delivering a world class performance in his/her role; you would automatically have a world class organization which beats the competition hollow and is on the top of the table at every count.


In spite of several advances in industrial/organizational psychology and high degree of predictability that we claim with our psychometric and assessment tools we still continue to fail to create such a world class organization.


I am not against these assessment tools or the role of individuals’ strengths in helping him/her deliver a world beating performance. My thoughts on this revolve around the factors outside of an individual which may have a bearing on his/her performance and thus act as barriers or enablers.

In my mind, the first step on this journey of creating world class organization would be to learn from your best. Learning from your best may lead you to identify the typical traits of your star performers in a particular role and then create/modify assessment tools to identify how closely your future hire is exhibiting such traits if put in similar situations. This would mean that you are getting more of such people who mirror the behaviors of the best in critical situations and hence their chances of success in real world situations may multiply because their thinking patterns are closer to those of your stars. This actually may be seen as an extension of the age old adage of "recent past being the best indicator of future behavior". Thus, you may be filtering those people who do not fit the thought patterns of your stars at the outset itself. Critics may argue here that reactions in simulated situations may wary wildly from those in real life situations but this however may be seen as our attempt to get close to identifying future stars through the behaviors of our current stars.


Now, if we did have a tool which allowed us to slot individuals according to their talents and then helped us put them onto such tailor made roles, we would surely be setting them up for success. This however, is only one side of the story, one critical piece of this puzzle is our local level manager. Our managers have to ensure that he/she is giving all the individuals on his/her team an opportunity to maximize his talents/strengths on the job. A failure on the part of the manager to recognize people for their uniqueness would definitely prevent individuals from reacting in their most natural way and hence would curtail their ability to perform and leverage their inherent talents and strengths. Hence, it may be imperative for us as a organization, to create an enabling environment with the help of adequate managerial education, sensitization and support around improving their people management capability and recognizing them for their ability to encourage individuals to put their strengths to work. Furthermore, a manager must be able to create an engaging environment which fosters creation of more organizational builders and curtails value destroying behavior.


Another lever which we could look at putting to use to ensure superior application and performance is Recognition. Recognizing the right behaviors at the right time is one very critical piece of ensuring that we are getting the desired performance from all on the team. First step in this could be around defining the right behaviors and outcomes that would be recognized and rewarded. So, we need to define the right behaviors which propagate organizational philosophy at both organizational level and at the local team level. Once there is clarity and understanding on the expected behaviors it is time to recognize and create "heroes". These heroes would help you showcase the right kind of behaviors which revolve around maximizing your strengths and hence delivering world class performance.


To sum it all up, it may be said that in your journey to create a world class organization it may be critical to design assessment tools which draw on your organizational learning’s and help you identify the diamonds and it is the ability of your local level managers to polish those diamonds that may help you determine how sparkling they will be in their role given the right kind of organizational enablers to lead you down the path of world class performance.

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Creating a Great Workplace!

Almost every OD professional and/or organizational leader has creating a great workplace as one critical KRA item for them. They resort to various tools and tricks to ensure that there is sufficient to activity to showcase when questioned on what they are doing to create a great workplace such as employee engagement initiatives, fun @ work activities (which essentially are only fun activities with no direct impact on creating a great workplace), recognition drives etc.

Seldom do we find our respected professionals trying to uncover what actually makes a great workplace and why do we even need a great workplace. A lot of organizations even with lousy people practices and totally disengaged and disillusioned employees may still be busy booking huge orders and delivering the numbers and in this era of 3 year long shelf life for CEO's if you are delivering numbers, does it really matter what kind of a workplace you are creating.

A lot has been written and argued about the need for creating a great workplace and it is always heartening to see every time a CEO puts his/her foot down and ensures that the whole organization is marching towards a common goal of creating a great workplace with a single point agenda of achieving SUSTAINED BUSINESS success. So, it can safely be said that the outcome a business may achieve by creating a great workplace is SUSTAINED BUSINESS success.

Now, coming back to the basic question, what do we mean by a great workplace?? Without an understanding of this basic definition I am not sure how successful we can be in our effort to create a great workplace.

To my mind a great workplace is one where employees have a psychological ownership of the organization, are willing to go that extra mile, look forward to contributing to the business success, have their personal goals completely aligned to the organizational imperatives, are looking forward to making everyday count at the workplace and see themselves as an integral part of a larger purpose.

If the above symptoms indicate that we have succeeded in creating a great workplace, what is that we need to work upon to make sure that the above symptoms start showing on the ground.

On a closer scrutiny of these symptoms you may find that all of them are actually outcomes of the work environment that we are able to create. The biggest player in creating this enabling work environment which necessitates exhibition of the above mentioned behaviors by our workforce is a function of how effective our local level managers are in their interactions with their teams. It is an established fact that managers are the lenses through which an employee visualizes the organization at large and hence it is the ability of our managers to create an enabling environment which can help our workforce exhibit behaviors which are congruent with that of the employees at a great workplace.

While the local level managers are the lead players in our effort to create a great workplace, they need to be supported adequately at an organizational level with necessary enablers to ensure that they are able to positively impact employees in their interactions and hence provide an environment which creates a great workplace.

In conclusion, it may be said that creating a great workplace is a function of creating great managers and hence our efforts of creating great workplace may bear maximum fruits if we were to root them in impacting, empowering and sensitizing our local level managers, with adequate support and role modeling from the organizational leadership. Every time we are faced with a question of creating a great workplace it may be our best bet to success if we were to keep our local level managers at the center of our strategy and design interventions around them. So, always remember, it is not the OD professional or the HR head who can create a great workplace, they can only be facilitators of change and it is our local level managers who can actually be the change and ensure that we are creating a great workplace for sustained business success.

Powerful advice for managers to improve employee engagement: Free E-Book

The 1900+ member strong employee engagement network has come out with the second edition of its free e-book for managers. This book contains simple yet  powerful advice for managers to improve employee engagement.

Click on the link below to download your copy:


Get the free e-book

I have had the pleasure of being one of the contributors to this great source of advice with my following one line statements:

• Before you start engaging an employee, know him and respect him as an individual first and engagement will follow.
• A manager should always remember he/she is "on stage"- and his/her subordinates notice every little trait so always exhibit the behavior you would want them to emulate.

The Toxic Tandem- by Robert I. Sutton

Let’s be clear: It’s never easy to be a great boss, even in good economic times. It’s challenging in part because of an unfortunate dynamic that naturally arises in relationships of unequal power. Research confirms what many of us have long suspected: People who gain authority over others tend to become more self-centered and less mindful of what others need, do, and say. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded because a boss’s self-absorbed words and deeds are scrutinized so closely by his or her followers. Combined, these tendencies make for a toxic tandem that deserves closer study.



To appreciate the first half of the dynamic—that bosses tend to be oblivious to their followers’ perspectives—consider the “cookie experiment” reported by the psychologists Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson in 2003. In this study, teams of three students each were instructed to produce a short policy paper. Two members of each team were randomly assigned to write the paper. The third member evaluated it and determined how much the other two would be paid, in effect making them subordinates. About 30 minutes into the meeting, the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies—a welcome break that was in fact the focus of the experiment. No one was expected to reach for the last cookie on the plate, and no one did. Basic manners dictate such restraint. But what of the fourth cookie—the extra one that could be taken without negotiation or an awkward moment? It turns out that a little taste of power has a substantial effect. The “bosses” not only tended to take the fourth cookie but also displayed signs of “disinhibited” eating, chewing with their mouths open and scattering crumbs widely.


It’s a cute little experiment, but it beautifully illustrates a finding consistent across many studies. When people—independent of personality—wield power, their ability to lord it over others causes them to (1) become more focused on their own needs and wants; (2) become less focused on others’ needs, wants, and actions; and (3) act as if written and unwritten rules that others are expected to follow don’t apply to them. To make matters worse, many bosses suffer a related form of power poisoning: They believe that they are aware of every important development in the organization (even when they are remarkably ignorant of key facts). This affliction is called “the fallacy of centrality”—the assumption that because one holds a central position, one automatically knows everything necessary to exercise effective leadership.


Now let’s look at the other half of the dynamic—that followers devote immense energy to watching, interpreting, and worrying about even the smallest and most innocent moves their superiors make. This is something we’ve long known about animals; studies of baboon troops show that the typical member glances at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds to see what he is doing. And although people don’t check what their boss is doing two or three times a minute, this tendency is well documented in human groups, too. As the psychologist Susan Fiske puts it, “Attention is directed up the hierarchy. Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa.” Fiske explains: “People pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power.” Further, people tend to interpret what they see the boss do in a negative light. Keltner and his colleagues report that when the top dog makes an ambiguous move (one that isn’t clearly good or bad for followers), followers are most likely to construe it as a sign that something bad is going to happen to them. Related studies also show that when people down the pecking order feel threatened by their superiors, they become distracted from their work. They redirect their efforts to trying to figure out what is going on and to coping with their fear and anxiety—perhaps searching the web for insight or huddling with their peers to gossip, complain, and exchange emotional support. As a result, performance suffers.

Robert I. Sutton (robert.sutton@stanford.edu) is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, where he cofounded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. He is the author of The No Asshole Rule (Business Plus, 2007) and is currently writing a book on great bosses.

"You are on stage"

"You are on stage"- These four words are something that all the people associated with performing arts in any way would be well versed with, be it in the school play, or a recital. The idea behind these words is that every move of yours is being observed and every step you take is being scrutinized.

But the question is why am I stating this obvious thought on this particular platform??

The reason why I am stating this is because this is as relevant in a organizational context as it relevant on the stage...but how is being on stage relevant in an organization??

This is something that every manager in the organization needs to be mindful off in everything he/she does. Most managers fail to realize that as they observe their team members for their performance, actions and behavior, in the same way the team members observe them in the way the act, treat their superiors, peers and subordinates and conduct themselves at the workplace.

Every little action of yours as a manager is something that your team members/subordinates are observing and taking cues from. If you do not want them chatting with their friends while in office, make sure that you yourself are not doing it. Same way, if you want them to extend cooperation to other colleagues and members of other teams, make sure that you are doing the same thing with your peers and setting the right tone for them. If as a manager you are busy being a jerk then it will not be wise of you to expect other team members to be behaving any differently.

As a manager or a team leader it is imperative for you to live the behavior that you want your team to emulate. Always remember “you are being watched”!!

As another year comes to close, we see more and more instances of how the best of organizations continue to survive and prosper despite the global meltdown and one common theme that may explain the tenacity of these organizations to weather such a storm is the people who form these organizations. Thus, if you are looking to build a great enterprise make sure that you are building great teams and by extension great people managers.

Wishing all of you and your loved ones a very happy and successful 2010!!