Leading With Friendship

When I told a favorite client I was leaving John Hancock after 21 years, he had a surprising reply: "You're about to find out who your real friends are."

Little did he know the topic of friendship, specifically friendship at work, was a recent focus of mine. In my final days at the office I had come to an unexpected realization: of all the great benefits I received from my employer, the best was something I scarcely ever thought about – the opportunity to practice being a friend.

Friendship may seem like an odd skill to put in one’s LinkedIn profile, but leaders who prioritize it do themselves an immense service, both professionally and personally. It’s also a skill AI cannot replicate.

To begin, it would help to understand the nature of friendship in a professional context.

"Real" Friends and "Deal" Friends

Most of what we need to know about friendship was written by Aristotle 2,400 years ago. In Nicomachean Ethics, he established friendship as a good surpassing all material possessions: “For without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”

We are, after all, not just rational but relational beings. Ancient philosophy and modern science show again and again that the deeper we can share our successes and sorrows with others, the happier we will be.

So friendships are essential, but not all are created equal. In Aristotle’s hierarchy, friendships of utility and pleasure are ultimately transitory and self-interested. Only “virtuous” friendships are pure, lasting and self-giving. Virtuous friendships are, by definition, not possible when financial incentives enter the picture.

Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and Harvard University happiness expert. He offers a helpful modern twist on Aristotle: in our lives we have “real friends” and “deal friends.” Real friends are those who are joyfully useless to us. They love us for who we are, not what we do. It’s with them that we can have truly unguarded conversations. Deal friends are built on mutual (we hope!) professional benefit. They can still be can still be friendly, warm and productive, but they have at least some degree of self-interest.

A huge challenge for professionals as we age is that the demands of work steal time from real friendships and make deal friendships even more transitory. To escape this doom loop, we can turn to one of philosophy’s heaviest hitters, Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas's simple definition of friendship is to will the good of the other, for the sake of the other. Rather than focus on the purpose of the friendship, as Aristotle does, Aquinas defines friendship by the mindset you bring to it. This standard can be lived out in “real” friendships among true equals, as well as “deal” friendships, where the asymmetry of personal interests is unavoidable.

When put into practice in our professional lives, it creates a new category – “real-deal" friendships. Here are some examples of real-deal friends in action:

• They care about your success in work and life. This is the most obvious and important distinction. The best leaders, and the best friends, genuinely care about you flourishing. I know a leader who emphasizes this in every hiring conversation. He makes a point to tell prospective employees that he cares about their success beyond work, and he expects them to feel the same about their colleagues.

• They remember what you talked about last time. Any salesperson will tell you this is essential to building a relationship. It requires presence and attentiveness, and the best ones do this intentionally and genuinely. They even follow up to see how your daughter’s recital went, or how your dad is doing after surgery. Leading with friendship makes this best practice effortless.

• They take an interest in what interests you. Some people only light up when the subject interests them. I remember a dinner with a Rolex enthusiast who shut down every time the conversation veered from wristwear. When you care enough to delve into another's esoteric pursuits, trust grows and you learn something new.

• They tell you the truth, even when it’s hard: It’s much easier to say “nice job” after your presentation goes off the rails. A real-deal friend buys you lunch afterward, shares a laugh about it, and then gives you some tips about how to do better next time.

• They celebrate your wins, even when it’s their loss: A real-deal friend celebrate your promotion even when it makes their own life harder.

This approach can be practiced by any leader in any situation, even in the extreme case of a boss who must fire an employee. The boss-employee relationship is the most asymmetrical professional relationship, and it’s likely why CEOs are so lonely. A leader has a responsibility to a mission that can at times supersede friendship, but it's in the toughest situations that Aquinas’s wisdom makes the biggest impact. It enables leaders to stay true to their mission without losing the humanity of the person in front of them.

Of course, acting this way takes time – both in the moment and over a lifetime of practice. While time is a constraint, it need not be a prohibitive one.  This is especially true if you work at one of the big, stable, “boring” corporations that are particularly well suited for practicing the art of friendship.

Big Companies & The Ingredients for Friendship

Making friends was the last thing on my mind when I joined John Hancock. I was barely a year out of college. I had plenty of friends; what I needed was a paycheck. For most of the next two decades I lived what I figured was a normal, compartmentalized life – work was for work, and the rest of my life was for family and friends. Over time, however, cracks emerged in the wall.

Colleagues who knew me as a young, single, not entirely mature young man watched me become an older, married father of four. Other real-life matters crept into the workplace: a colleague’s terminal illness, another’s sick child, another’s broken heart and broken marriage. Without intention, time, familiarity and adversity forged friendships.

It should be no surprise. Along with universities and the military, big companies are ideal places to foster friendship. The key ingredients are all there:

• Proximity over time: Friendships are best nurtured in common spaces over time. An office building, like a university campus, provides ample opportunities for planned and unplanned interactions – the coffee machine, elevator, the lobby. With hardly any effort, familiarity turns to affection.

• Shared adversity: It’s one thing to be near people, it’s another to be close to them when disaster strikes – and then to work with them on the path forward. I now fondly recall the years coming out of the 2008 financial crisis when nothing was assured within our business. The work friends I made then remain some of my closest.

• Shared Identity and History: Big, stable companies are more than corporations, they are institutions. Within the walls, employees contribute to the common identity and weave minor histories into the broader company story.

• Stability: Finally, the stability and longevity of the institution itself is a major advantage for fostering friendship. Startups and distressed companies have the other three ingredients, but when stability is absent it’s natural to keep people at arm’s length.

For big companies, investing in friendship is a no-brainer. It costs nothing and has the potential to transform culture and business results.

A Call To Friendship

I’ll conclude with two reasons you should take friendship seriously in your professional life: the world needs it, and it makes you a better person.

We may be at the beginning of the biggest shift in work since the Industrial Revolution. That age turned humans into machines; AI could do the opposite, taking care of everything except what truly makes us human — relationships, creativity, and the power to reach for something higher.

AI is well suited to the mechanics of deal friendship: remembering details, following up, optimizing networks. What it cannot do, by its nature, is will the good of another. That is a uniquely human capacity, and it becomes more valuable as AI commoditizes everything else. Leaders who lean into friendship now are doing what no machine can replicate.

Regardless of how AI plays out, leading with friendship has an unequivocal benefit – it makes us better humans. I’ve found in my own career when I wasn’t prioritizing this, I was less attentive, less humble, less caring than I wanted to be. Reorienting toward friendship is a great way out of a selfish loop and back to the path of virtue.

After all, the qualities of a great friend are also those of a great leader. They are attentive, honest, curious, generous, courageous — the list goes on. Practicing the art of friendship might be the greatest self-improvement plan you can find. It's great for business too.

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J.J. Bowman is an insurance executive from Framingham, MA, where lives his wife, four children, and their Boston Terrier, Fritz.