🤫 Whisper #11: Transactional relationships
How often do you approach your colleagues in transactional ways?
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Whisper #11
How often do you approach your colleagues in transactional ways?
This question helps me step back and recognize the error of my ways when I get so caught up in the tasks of work that I forget to take the time to build relationships with my colleagues.
I’ve made multiple lifelong friendships at work. They started when we were working heads-down on hearty projects, and they bloomed into real-world friendships when I started to see my colleagues as more than just colleagues: as fully dimensional people who could bring more to my life than simply hitting our OKRs and KPIs together.
The pandemic push toward remote work and endless Zoom calls profoundly affected how we connect with our colleagues. We want so badly to get off of video calls, so we leave no time for small talk. There are no serendipitous lunchtime conversations anymore. No water cooler run-ins. No “oh, I’m addicted to those sour gummy worms too!” chats in the micro-kitchen. No in-person war-rooms at 5am launching a product you’ve spent 1.5 years building. No “hey, it’s Thursday, want to get some half-off oysters for happy hour?”
The result is that we don’t know their dog's name or their kid’s favorite kind of dinosaur or how they came to study philosophy or what makes them them or why they wear socks with dancing pickles on them.
Instead, we just transact with our colleagues.
“What’s the status on X deliverable?"
“When do you think Y will be ready for go-live?”
“What action items are left for the security review?”
Transactional relationships at work have a ton of short-term productivity benefits (you certainly can get more done in a day when you aren’t chilling in the break room chatting with Nancy about her new apartment or playing with Remi’s puppy in the hallway). But they limit our long-term sense of satisfaction with work and life. They leave so much on the table, including our productivity and fulfillment at work as time approaches infinity.