There’s a tightrope we all need to walk in our professional relationships, the balance between self and role.
One of the greatest joys of my professional life is that I’ve found a career that allows me to work with so many great people. Folks who are committed to social change are, in my experience, more likely to be their whole selves in a professional environment, and this makes it more common to develop strong relationships with our colleagues.
This is a plus, but it creates something delicate: learning to be in relationship both as our selves and as our roles.
Because sometimes there is a virtuous, reinforcing loop between our strong personal and professional relationships: great friends find it easy to fill in the blanks for each other and have each others’ backs. We have a deep foundation of trust to draw upon, one that gives us more latitude and more leeway.
But sometimes these forces pull in opposite directions. We disagree about something, or one person has to make a tough call that affects the other. Or, harder still, we need to have a difficult professional conversation that could create strain in our personal relationship.
What we must remember is that it’s our obligation to push to this uncomfortable place—especially if our shared work is in service of others. We must be willing to take on relational risk, to prioritize the conversations we need to have as professionals even if this might weaken our personal relationship for a period of time.
To make this possible, both people need to be committed to, and adept at, switching hats—to know that sometimes we’re talking as friends, and sometimes we’re talking as colleagues, and there are days when these cannot be the same things.
And, the hard fact is that, the more senior you get, the harder it gets to take “role” hat off, even if you’d like to.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t have strong friendships and relationships at work, it just means that your role has become important enough in your organization that you occupy it for others no matter what.