Creative Rebellion Essays: Trust, friendship and kindness
Feasting with friends — Photo by JC Caldwell
My wife suggested I write about friendship for this essay. Probably because I don’t make close friends easily. I, like most people, have many acquaintances but friends, true friends, are the next level. I look at relationships with others as concentric rings. On the outside ring are the day-to-day interactions I have with strangers and working inwards, there are the civil interactions and relationships I have with co-workers and acquaintances and beyond that is the circle of friendship, some family members, and at core is the innermost trust-based relationship with my wife and daughter.
It’s been my experience that all relationships are defined by the trust one has for another. You have to build trust with one another, and in a sense, there’s a transactional element to it. With the design team I lead, we have to trust each other or the system breaks down: I trust them to do their best work and they trust me to champion them, protect them and give them direction. That’s the value exchange. But the moment I break trust with them, it’s over. Or at least, it will be a very uphill slog to re-establish trust with them. Years of faith can be undone in a moment.
Professional relationships are based on civil interactions and can turn into friendships over time but it’s not a given.
Relationships with senior executives can be more complex for as an authority figure, they’ve been trained, consciously or subconsciously, to be very aware of their ranking in the company hierarchy. Whether the title and rank have been hard-earned or the result of fortuitous timing or political intrigue or some combination therein, once a person is in a high profile role there is the associated stress and responsibility that comes with it. In my role, I assume that my direct reports and designers are the best in breed; I assume they are brilliant and it’s up to them to prove to me that they are not. I trust them to do their jobs well. I believe in a passion-driven culture. No fear.
In my time in the workplace, I’ve found that many leaders do the exact opposite: they require their employees to prove their worth to them with the implicit assumption that they may not be up to snuff. This dynamic means that when the employee actually does a good job, it’s not acknowledged but if they fail, then it just confirms what the manager had always assumed. Common behaviors include micromanagement, clock-watching and a draconian enforcement of roles and responsibilities. This is a result of fear. The leader may feel a bit of imposter syndrome and is terrified that if they are not in control of everything, then it will reflect poorly on them and this in turns puts them into a fight-or-flight mode which dominoes into a fear-based work culture. And ultimately a toxic work environment.
What I’ve learned is that jobs change. Titles change. Roles change. Companies change. But the healthy relationship I forge with a co-worker or a direct report will transcend the ups and downs of professional life.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have leaders and designers who currently work with me that have worked with me in prior organizations going back as far as 2003. Like a traveling theater troupe, we call on each other as circumstances change in our employment or the economic environment. We have, over time, evolved our connections into friendships as well as professional relationships.
I realize how dispensible we all are within a work environment – any work environment. Even if you’re the founder of a company, you can be replaced (case in point: Steve Jobs, fired and then rehired). But what I’ve noticed is that the employees and leaders who took time to really invest in the well-being of their team are missed the most. The wonderful thing about great leaders is that their impact will live on after they leave an institution. The flipside of this is that often toxic leaders also leave a legacy of PTSD within the groups they have affected and unfortunately the poor behaviors and inherited mindset can continue on long after they’ve left the building. In my time, I’ve had my share of bad bosses but much like being the child of abusive parents, you can either in turn become an abusive parent yourself or decide that the buck stops with you. Strong leaders stop the “sins of the father.” And a wonderful leader will leave a positive pattern and playbook of how to continue a healthy, passion and creative-led workplace environment after they’ve exited.
I recently spoke at an internal company design summit and I ended it with a thought about kindness. It occurs to me, that throughout the entire journey of life, that the most important attribute we need to cultivate is kindness. Sounds a bit woo woo and schmaltzy but in reality, if you think about it, when people die, the most powerful and impactful obituaries are those that inevitably relate the kindness of the deceased and their positive impact on their community, their company, their friends and their families. Over time, we often forget the captains of industry, the celebrities, the rich and famous but we remember kindness and artistry that contributes to the betterment of mankind: the poets, the writers, the artists, the musicians and the philosophers.
So there are gradations of friendship, from civil co-worker to close friends to family but the throughline is kindness.
It’s my hope, that as I progress through life, both professional and personal, that I become a better practitioner of radical kindness.
In this time of negative media saturation, political divisiveness, and just general anxiety and pronounced anger, the world needs kindness more than ever. And heck, I may end up actually making more friends even though I feel that you are lucky if you have one person in your life you can truly trust and be open with. That’s a true friend.
John
What I’m reading:
Autumn – by Karl Ove Knaussgard. This author is unafraid to expose the truth about himself and those around him with his extremely personal memoirs. His famous opus My Struggle destroyed his relationships with his friends and family (his wife divorced him) but in Autumn, he writes to his unborn daughter about life in a series of touching, beautiful essays.
The Fellowship of the Ring – By J.R.R. Tolkein I recently came across this book again. I first read it when I was around 10 years old and it blew my mind. I had never been so transported to a complete world so different than my suburban Texan surroundings. I still love the places it takes me. Norse and Arthurian mythologies come to life in a classic war between the darkness and light over the one Ring to rule them all.
Batman (2016-) Vol. 1: I Am Gotham – by David Finch, illustrated by Mikel Janin and Ivan Reis. I’m still a Batman nerd. And my daughter knows this. This graphic novel was a gift from her; she picked it up for me as she was on a school trip. She knows her dad. I like the way that Batman has to battle bad guys with his wits and brawn without relying on some Superman-like superpowers. I look forward to checking out the next installments because I am a nerd.
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