Blurring the Lines
All too often, I watch professional relationships evolve into personal relationships between colleagues. By personal relationships, I’m referring to coworkers who hang out after work, go to each other’s houses, and/or become romantically involved. While it does provide fascinating office gossip, romantic entanglements with a coworker are avenues many people know to avoid. However, many people think that developing outer-office friendships with coworkers is okay. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, this creates a blurry line between your professional and personal life that could affect you in your professional career.
One question you have to ask yourself is this: do you really want to bring your coworker’s personal issues into your professional relationship? For me, the answer is a firm “no.” I once worked with a coworker who had no problem sharing the intimate details of his personal life with me. I didn’t ask for it, nor did I encourage it, but he had a huge problem with over sharing. I knew way more than I needed to know about what he did off the clock. His extracurricular activities included but was not limited to: smoking weed, getting extremely drunk every weekend, having one-night stands (and not remembering how he met the woman he woke up with because he was high and/or drunk), and getting arrested for everything between driving on a suspended license and drunk driving (twice). For some people, having this guy around was like having reality TV (think Real World) sans a camera. For me, it dramatically changed my impression of him as a colleague, and I no longer saw him as a business professional. Instead, I saw him as a drunken pothead who managed to stumble into work on Mondays and do just enough to be adequate at his job. He never thought about the consequences of his actions, of the possibility that I may have become his supervisor; he had armed me with a laundry list of his faults, things that would have blocked him from promotion. Fortunately, for my colleague, that scenario never happened, and we remained teammates. While this is an extreme case, it shows one of the dangers in allowing colleagues to know too much about your personal life.
As I mentioned earlier, romantic entanglements should never occur between coworkers. The minute you cross that line, your romantic relationship will become office gossip. That’s a guaranteed fact. It’s a bad enough situation to date a coworker, but it’s worse if the person you’re dating is in a supervisory/management position over you. Dating a manager or your boss creates the impression that you’re receiving favoritism in your job, even if that’s not the case. For managers dating a subordinate, this looks extremely unprofessional and can dampen your professionalism among colleagues. People also have a tendency to speculate if a “meeting of the minds” is really occurring whenever you have closed door meetings with the manager/subordinate you’re dating. Is that really the kind of office gossip you want attached to your name and professional reputation? I would think most people wouldn’t, but that doesn’t stop them from dating or crossing lines they shouldn’t. I knew a married colleague who cheated on her spouse with a coworker. The affair was not kept on the down low whenever the pair were seen together at the office, creating a high level of buzz that eventually made its way back to her spouse (who filed for divorce). Shortly afterwards, the coworker dumped the soon-to-be divorced colleague. There was also an incident involving a colleague who was a serial dater among the men at the office. When she became pregnant, jokes about which colleague fathered the baby were frequent. Some of the men who dated her were teased ruthlessly by other male colleagues about being a “baby daddy.” As for her, she eventually left the company after realizing her professional reputation was in shreds, and managers did not see her as a serious candidate for promotions. Finally, there was a colleague who thought it was appropriate to have phone sex with a female colleague he was dating one late night at the office. Unfortunately, for him, he was not alone, and a top-level manager who was leaving for the evening walked by, overhearing his little phone interlude. I don’t think I need to state what happened to him. Again, some of these are extreme cases, but it should reinforce a “no dating at the office” policy, even if your company doesn’t have one.
As a rule, I keep my professional and personal life completely separate. I keep my personal life so secret that my colleagues don’t know anything about what I do, whom I hang with, who my family is (and if I have one), and where I go when I’m off the clock. I do not talk about my personal life, and I personally don’t care to hear about my coworkers personal lives at the office. When I’m at work, I’m there to do a job. That is, after all, what I’m paid to do. I’m not there to make friends, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not friendly. For me, it is important for me to keep my professional life and personal life in two separate categories, especially after an incident that happened early in my career.
I once made the mistake of becoming too friendly and personal with some coworkers. When I was promoted, those coworkers, whom I considered friends, eventually treated me differently and even started to trash talk me to others. The things they said got back to me, and I learned very quickly that I made a mistake in allowing that professional barrier to slip and become personal. Of course, I realize many people talk about their coworkers behind their backs, but for me, I took that incident more personally because of my perceived friendship with them. Not one to learn the hard way, I made a vow to never repeat that mistake, and I have remained firm on my belief in not allowing personal friendships to develop with coworkers. By doing this, I removed any personal element out of disagreements or issues I have with coworkers.
Maintaining a strictly business relationship has more pros than the cons for allowing personal relationships to develop with a colleague. It keeps things really simple and uncomplicated if you only have a professional relationship with colleagues. For me, I’ll take keeping things simple any day. There are enough complications in life. Why add one more complication?