"We Don't Hire Friends"
Making Friendship Irrelevant
“I care about you too much to ruin our friendship.”
Some version of this line has been said in many a romantic drama. And off the stage it has also broken the hearts of countless unrequited lovers. Fundamentally, it’s a withholding of personal commitment; a stated desire to keep the safe and predictable status quo; or perhaps just a nice way to avoid uncomfortable and awkward conversations.
But this post isn’t about romance. It’s about men and their friends.
A Bad Idea
At a recent gathering of my circle of middle-aged parents, we talked about stuff that middle aged parents talk about: kids, house projects, and the cost of everything. One of our friends mentioned they were looking for a specific kind of contractor for a project at their home. Another friend piped up and said “yeah, [Bob] can do that, he’s licensed and…” But the first couple quickly cut in with “Oh we don’t do business with or hire friends, it’s just not a good idea.”
This is conventional wisdom for many. I’ve had people tell me they wouldn’t do business with me, not because I was untrustworthy, not because I cost too much, or because I delivered poor results, but because I was their friend. If you do any kind of work where you speak directly with clients, you’ve probably heard the same thing.
There’s too much that can go wrong. It’s awkward to discuss money issues with friends. What if there’s a disagreement? What if they don’t deliver? What if you have to fire them? Or what if they fire you? What if the idea doesn’t work out? What if money is lost? What if someone is dishonest?
For atomic individuals like us, these are existentially terrifying questions. To save us from our friends and family, we reach out for the anonymity of the market. Of course, whoever we end up working with is, in all probability, someone else’s friend or family, but since we don’t know them, no big deal! (phew!)
Everyone that I count on and everyone that I pay needs to be held at arms length, so that I can sue them, drop them, write a one star review, or not feel betrayed by them in case something goes wrong.
“We don’t do business with or hire friends.”
This is fundamentally the same statement as the romantically lethal: “I care about you too much to ruin our friendship”; a withholding of personal commitment; a stated desire to keep the safe and predictable status quo; or perhaps just a nice way to avoid uncomfortable and awkward conversations.
Now obviously, you can have friends who you don’t want to date and marry. And you can have good friends with bad business ideas or poor skills with whom you should not do business. I’m not saying you should go out tomorrow and get into a pyramid scheme with your neighbors. Or invest your life savings into a Pizza & Pie restaurant with your buddy and hope that nothing but the good vibes of your friendship will carry you through. Some people are incompetent, lazy or untrustworthy. Some business ideas are bad. Vetting is important.
But I do mean to point out that it’s attitudes, beliefs and statements like “we don’t do business with or hire friends” which unintentionally keep us from building powerful communities. And that should you be blessed with a friendship with someone who is competent in something you need, or something you’d like to do, it’s in your interest to do business with them.
This is Especially Important For Men
In my book, (big news on the second edition coming soon), I make the following point about male friendship:
“One of the greatest compliments a man can give to another man is saying some guy “has my back” or a similar expression of that feeling of duty, shared obligation and loyalty. A man with thousands of other men to talk with and understand him may still feel very lonely. But a man with just a handful of other guys who “have his back” is never alone. And that, more than a shoulder to cry on, can change his life.”1
Modern life has already removed so many contexts where men can have each other’s backs. We cannot hunt for necessities together, we cannot raise barns together, we cannot patrol and protect our tribe together. It’s difficult to work daily together on almost anything.
The only thing that’s easy to do together is a consuming, man-cave like friendship2. Get together, hang out, play the game, watch the game, talk about the game, or the kid, or the job, or the news, and go home. However, it’s hard to feel the weight of having each other’s back when all that’s on the line is splitting the pizza tab.
No, something, somewhere along the line has to count, someone needs to have our back, which means there has to be risk. We need to feel the loyalty, the trust, the respect, and the dignity that can’t be provided by arms-length, impersonal transactions with corporations; which can only give us a full-tilt turnstile of faces who can never have our back.
Real Life
We all know what the conventional wisdom says you stand to lose when doing business with friends and family. But what do you lose by not doing it? I think about how working with and hiring/being hired by friends and family has forced me to change: I’ve become more comfortable with both confronting others and being confronted. I’ve become more vocal in my expectations. I’ve exercised forgiveness and been forgiven.
For example, a few years ago, a friend did me a triflingly small (and perfectly legal) business favor. But it unexpectedly grew into this big issue that cost both of us time and money to undo. In the thick of it, it would’ve been easy to turn on each other or to avoid blame. Instead we both apologized to each other for the unintentional complication and worked together to solve it. We did and are still great friends today.
Sincerity, patience, grace, trust, honesty, confrontation, having and expressing standards, forgiveness, communication, and accountability are 1) learnable real life skills that anyone can develop with practice and intention but 2) they seem socially risky to ask of others in the 21st century.
But for those who risk it, there is reward, including direct, personal access to people who have skills, the beginnings of a network for your children to tap into and the knowledge that you are financially contributing to a community. Not to mention some relief from our impersonal/AI chatbot/terms and conditions/“it’s going to ask you a question” economy.
The careful and judicious embrace of some social liability is the difference between the lonely, radical individual and the man who has a village full of other guys who truly have his back.
After all, what are friends for?
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I Can Help You
My goal is to help 1,000,000 fathers to BE intentional leaders. It’s easy to write, read, and engage with these ideas, but it’s much harder to embody them and make them real in your life. To that end, I’m available to meet with you to help you succeed.
On the flip side, this is why the greatest offense in most male circles, from chivalrous knights to modern street gangs, is not a verbal insult, insensitivity, or neglect but outright betrayal – one man essentially saying to his friend: “I no longer have your back”.
But even then, if I have my own man-cave I may not see the need to come over to yours.
On point, as usual. My last article dealt with the appeal the mafia, more specifically, the Cosa Nostra has to men, and a great deal of it is this sense of "this is my guy, he has my back", and the camaraderie brought about by bonds of obligation and honor, however twisted the motivations were. The mafia offered young men a wrong answer to a real need, the need of banding together with and depending on other men. I tried countless times to talk about starting a business with my closest friends, and finally they agreed we need to do something. It's a start. I think, however, a leader with very good conciliatory traits is needed in this sort of arrangement.
Ah, I wish we could have had this experience.
We made a deal to care for my grandparents in their old age. My grandfather, the one I was dealing with and trusted, passed suddenly first.
We kept our commitment, and six years went by of us caring for her and her property, at a heavy expense to us. However, we were given “promises” of compensation from my grandmother and the Boomers when all was said and done.
Well, guess who did the predictable thing and ghosted/broke all promises? They pulled the rug so fast and had been planning to do so the entire time.
Now we have no family, and we took a crippling hit to our growing family.
In order for this to work you have to be dealing with moral people, and those are hard to come by these days.