By Pearson Mbendera
We don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a world full of people. Some of these people will help us professionally and others we will help them ourselves. Life is about relationships. It’s not only dating where you have to meet the right people, but while in dating all you may need to do is meet the one (if s/he actually exists) in the professional world you need a lot of people. The big question is how can you meet the right people and how do you handle them?
There has been a lot of talk about building professional networks. Bring about people of similar professional interests who may help you in your career, exchange ideas, talk about anything or even be business partners with. Only you can decide the parameters of that professional relationship. This can be done by face to face communication or through online interaction. Linkedin is one popular site that brings about people together professionally.
But before you can even think of online networking or even before you worry about networking at all, we are born with people already in our circle and these are our family and relatives. And as time moves on, we make friends and these friendships may grow so close that they are like family and while they are formed primarily on the basis of social interactions, there is nothing that stops them from transforming into professional relationships or at least incorporating the latter into the former.
But do friends and relatives make up a good professional network? That depends. Relationships, social or otherwise are difficult to manage. There are emotions involved and a whole lot of issues some of which we have no control over, but when your relationship spans over different spheres, they might be even more difficult to handle. I mean if your friend hurts you professionally, any action you take against them, will it only be confined to your professional interaction or will it spill over to your social interaction and even affect other people in your social circle who have nothing to do with your professional lives.
There is no one who comes with a stamp of approval on the forehead, there is no way of knowing beforehand if the relationship is going to work or not. Sometimes you have to go with your gut and hope it won’t let you down.
I have been let down by the people close to me and in the end you wonder if a total stranger would have made a better. A certain family friend plumber we hired to do some plumbing work messed up things so bad despite putting so much faith in him. The kind of faith you wouldn’t have given out otherwise.
I remember meeting a guy when I was doing my attachment at this other small firm in Harare and he told me that he likes to think the best of people when he has just met them. Start on the positive note and take it from there. He was talking about me and considering I’m somewhat a trustworthy guy and he explained his theory so well, I liked it. But now I believe it’s best to start out at zero. Expecting nothing, good or otherwise from someone you don’t know well. I mean people do come with references but not everyone has good references and not everyone has bad references, you just might pick the wrong cluster of people to trace someone’s past behavior. From then we can either add points or subtracting depending on how they would have handled themselves.
The greatest thing to know is that, there is a big difference between our professional relationships and social relationships. The two may intersect at some point but they are different. For starters, they are formed out of different circumstances to serve different purposes. I mean you can send a birthday present to your boss, or have a drink with your colleagues or refer a friend for vacant position to someone else you know, that’s relationships crossing their original paths, but basically what you need from a friend is different from what you need from a boss, a colleague or a mentor.
In the end, it’s always best to have ground rules for relationships that overlap but personally I think professional and social relationship should be kept separate or at least overlap to a minimum degree. Relationships are complicated already, why the need to make them even more complicated. It’s difficult to tell your friend to work harder or at the worst, fire them for gross incompetence when it is totally called for just because your relationship outside the business environment will be affected.
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