What does friendship have to do with it?

White supremacy culture is a system of conditions. You will be loved if. You will be safe if. You will be accepted if.

The “if” usually requires you to behave certain ways, look certain ways, be certain ways.

If you conform in all the right ways, white supremacy culture will take care of you.

We can so very quickly trade in the parts of us that don’t conform - our identities, skills, values, beliefs, passions, talents and more. We hide them, underplay them, deny them. It’s not only tempting, but sometimes our very survival depends on it.

Conditional safety is after all still safety.

But at what cost?

In a system of conditional safety, who is left out? Who is harmed? What potential is unrealized?

And what is the cost even to those of us who benefit from conditional safety?

What have we traded in so that we can benefit?

What have we traded in so that we can be liked?

We talked a few weeks ago about people pleasing, and we’ve been talking on the CCI team about how this leads to folks trying to make friends and develop “personal relationships” in the workplace.

We want to work with people that we like, right?

And so it makes sense that we would hire people that we like, right?

And that we would hire people because we like them rather than because of their qualifications, right?

Wait what?

That’s the quiet part that people increasingly but not always know not to say out loud but is still a bigger factor in hiring than we’d like to admit.

Would we hire someone that we didn’t like but had great qualifications?

If many of us were honest, I think we’d say no.

Hopefully we hire people that have great qualifications and that we also like. I’m not sure I’m even saying we should hire people we don’t like, but this is basically inviting bias and discrimination in by the front door.

Especially when you consider how easily NOT liking someone then gets mistaken for underperformance. And I mean that quite literally.

No wonder there is so much energy in the workplace spent on “networking” and “developing personal relationships” by going out for lunch or drinks or happy hour or dinner or golfing or whatever it is that gets the right people to like you so you can advance in your career.

No wonder remote working is a huge relief for some, yes the more introverted, but also BIPOC and others who don’t conform with dominant identities or want to have to make friends at work.

So what does friendship have to do with it?

Should you NOT make friends at work?

Well, what I’ve found is different people have different comfort levels and assumptions about this. White folks often assume familiarity = friendship with BIPOC folks when that assumption is not in fact mutual, both at work and outside of work.

And either way, I would say that friendship should be consensual and optional. Malaika on the CCI team likes to say that in a culture of true inclusion and psychological safety, you should be able to work with people you hate! Certainly we as DEI consultants work with and coach all kinds of folks within our client organizations and whether we like every one of them is neither here nor there. We seem to get invested in their success regardless of whether we “like” then or would want to be friends with them.

I know it’s different when it’s a colleague you work alongside, especially on a small team like ours. But if you build trust and safety and do great work - I’m probably going to like you, even if I wouldn’t necessarily want to be friends outside of work!

The truth is that I’ve never really been very enthusiastic about making friends at work. In fact, I’ve generally been wary of it, as are many BIPOC folks for all the reasons I’ve described above. It’s hard to want to participate in a system that you are generally excluded from by default, although I will say I have made friends with people from work over the years, but I think in most cases those were exceptions rather than the default.

And now in my work I get to see how assumed friendships and overstepping of boundaries and the inability to distinguish between “liking” someone and their performance is riddled with bias and causes all kinds of harm.

I know this goes against a fundamental tenet of corporate life but friendship at work should be optional and not foundational.

And while it’s human to want to like the people we work with, we can stand to interrogate how we are defining “like” and if we are using it as a proxy for performance.

Why do we like or dislike someone and is it because of their performance or inspite of it? And how might being able to distinguish between the two help us shift towards equity and inclusion?

Banner photo by Leon Contreras on Unsplash

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