Jobs Change but People and Strong Relationships Endure

I remember clearly the first time I understood that relationships in the workplace were important: difficult to be sure, but also more valuable, and more tangible than I first realized. I discovered somewhat accidentally how to visualize their contours – a kind of social graph – 25 years before Facebook. And I realized that I already had the skills I needed to engage people in that context simply by asking about their history, listening to their stories and then following up. It’s not hard. And it changed the way I visualized the workplace.

I was consulting at a large consumer products company in the food industry, working a large, cross functional team. I was young so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realized that there were groups of people within the team who had worked together in the past. It’s like the young child who suddenly learns that their parents had lives before they were born, even before they knew each other! Can you imagine? It seems obvious now but, at the time, it was a kind of breakthrough. At each team meeting, I would learn something about prior teams, past experiences that were so powerful that at times they would even overwhelm the current team and situation. Sometimes I felt myself struggling against people who were not even present at the table but still exerted tremendous influence, not all of it healthy either.

Curious, I discovered that you could ask people about their experiences, and that they love to talk about them. I realized that, understanding these stories made it easier to work together, and more meaningful too. Suddenly I was able to imagine links, relationships between people based on shared stories. And I was impressed by the notion that by sharing old stories again we were forming new teams, new experiences. We were, in fact, writing stories in the present that would be shared in the future.

In New England in the 1980’s, the software industry was a fascinating place. Wang, Data General, Honeywell, Prime and DEC had essentially vanished. But it seemed that everywhere I turned I found vestiges of those teams. Sybase and Lotus where huge but their future was uncertain. How many people had I met from Object Design or Symbolics? What was going to happen next?

Once in the mid 90’s I found myself in a 19th Century mill struggling to understand what the Internet would bring in the 21st Century together with people I’d known for years from Sybase or just met from other local companies. 10 years before the very same office was filled with DEC employees hard at work on RDB. The people were still around, the conversations were all different, but the jobs had vanished.

In a moment my perspective on the workplace changed. Your job is not yours: it belongs to the company. And companies rise and fall with entire industries and a global economy. You have only your career, your experience and your relationships. And you’d better take them each seriously: keep them close when you move, treat them with care and respect and always, always invest in them.

In future posts I’ll be writing about what works for me. What kinds of investments pay dividends? And how I like to think about these techniques and tools in ways that are both natural and genuine.

Stay tuned.