Transcript, E204: Work friends with Kat Vellos

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LinkedIn News.

Jessi Hempel:

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel and this is Hello Monday. Today, let's talk about friendship. To start, I wanna tell you about my friend, Jennifer Reingold. Jen. I met Jen when we both worked at Fortune. She's a few years older than me. For seven years, our offices shared a wall. She really helped me. I was so new at reporting when I showed up. She shared her contacts with me, and she had this thing where she'd get right up in my face and be like, "Why are you even doing that?" She wasn't afraid to do that to anyone. It's what made her such a good reporter.

But what I remember is actually how many times she dropped in that chair across from me at my desk while I cried after break ups or after my step-father died. Or how we started going to the gym together at lunch, or we'd stop off for a drink with colleagues after a long day. Jen could literally convince anyone to stay for just one more until it was suddenly 10:00, and you knew that you would regret it the next day. Jen's a work friend, but of course, she's so much more than that. She's a friend friend. Why do we do that? Why do we add the qualifier, work. It's as if these friendships are somehow less important than, I don't know, home friends, school friends, church friends.

As a kid, I made new friends all the time, but now it's just so much harder. I have 2,300 friends on Facebook, no joke. But sometimes I'm just not sure who to call if I'm feeling lonely or down. It's like I've fallen out of touch. Relationships take time, and I spend most of mine managing family stuff. The rest of it is spent at work, which is why I think work friendships aren't extra. They're everything. But here's the thing. We're not talking about them much in 2023. We're coming off years of social isolation thanks to the pandemic. A lot of us have some sort of hybrid arrangement and our time with our colleagues happens over screens. And then there are these waves of layoffs that are just restructuring everything right now and leaving a lot of feeling like the people around us could just disappear. So that's why I reached out to today's guest.

Kat Vellos:

Because of the impact that these relationships with our colleagues have to shape our life, to influence our satisfaction, and our happiness, and our overall sense of wellbeing, I think it's a little bit risky to ignore the power that the relationships we have with colleagues have around feeling wellbeing, connection and sense of community even.

Jessi Hempel:

That's Kat Vellos in early 2020 right before the pandemic. Kat published a book called We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. Kat also hosts online friend matchmaking events called Here to Make Friends. Today, we're gonna talk about how friendships work in adulthood. We'll get into what we owe our friends and how reciprocity should work. She'll offer some approaches to cultivating new friends, especially when there's a screen between us. And we'll also discuss how social media can complicate everything. Here's Kat. Are my colleagues supposed to be my friends?

Kat Vellos:

The traits of a healthy friendship look very much like the traits of a healthy colleagueship. So in both situations, hopefully you have mutual enthusiasm for each other. You have trust hopefully with each other. There's a sense of camaraderie with each other, investing in each other's success and growth, having honest conversations. Like, all of these things are hopefully present in both, uh, your workplace (laughs) relationships and your friendships. And certainly, the types of conversations you might have will vary. Typically, they'll be a lot more personal or more intimate with friends, but some of the, um, adults that have talked to me about their friendships say that their workplace is the source of their closest friends in life. And often when they even leave the company, or their friend leaves the company, they keep that friendship going because it has become such an integral part of their life, and they become so close. And I myself have made some of my best friends at work over the years and held onto them for many, many more years than the time we (laughs) spent at that company.

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs) Yeah, me too. That's a wonderful thing. The jobs have left, but the people and the relationships have, have persisted. You know, one thing I'm really interested in is, you know, increasingly we're working in a hybrid way. We may have a screen that mediates the, the space between us, but is there a sort of how-to for how we turn relationships, particularly if we've come to each other for the first time in a hybrid environment, um, into friendships?

Kat Vellos:

Mm-hmm. This is a big one, especially because in the last couple of years in the pandemic so many millions of people were hired remotely. They haven't had a chance to be face to face with other people that they're ... that are at their company, and so forming those relationships has been harder to establish, uh, asynchronously or just over a Team chat, or Slack, or whatever you're using, or email. Um, and so, making that leap from someone you know to someone that feels like a friend or a colleague, to someone who then feels like a close friend, can be tough, and it really does take intention.

I recently published a guide on my blog called, like, How to Turn an Online Acquaintance into a Real Friend. And a lot of the advice I had in that guide applied whether the friend that you're hoping to make is somebody that you work with or not. And so, I include things in it like, checking first for mutual enthusiasm. Like, are you both, like, mutually excited to talk to each other? Do you both seem really interested to get to know each other better? Um, also make your intentions known. It's okay to tell someone, like, I really like talking to you, Jessi, and I would love to be friends with you. Um, ar-are you open to that? You know, and one thing that's useful about making your intentions known is the other person doesn't have to guess-

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Kat Vellos:

... what you're up to. (laughs) And if they're not available or not interested in that, they can set their boundary, and then you know maybe to turn your attention to somebody else. When you proceed to then try to deepen this relationship into, like, a closer friendship, I encourage people to connect in a variety of ways to be really warm and generous in how you connect, especially early on, to be supportive to each other, and to be consistent and recurring in the ways that you're having these touchpoints whether they're conversations or hangouts. All of those things will help really fortify and scaffold the foundation of a really strong connection at the early part of your friendship, or colleagueship.

Jessi Hempel:

Right. What do we owe our friends, and is it different in different friendships?

Kat Vellos:

Mm, great question. What we owe, I think, depends on the type of friendship that it is and what the situation is between you. So what we owe, for example, our closest, bestest, longest term, heart buddy friendship is different than what we owe an acquaintance that we recently met at a dinner party (laughs) last weekend, right. And these reciprocity mismatches are one of the biggest frustrations that people tell me come up in their relationship. The common causes that I find for lack of reciprocity are either, um, something being off in the communication or something being off in the compatibility. So it needs to feel fair, but fair doesn't always mean it's a one-to-one, right.

So we talked earlier about availability, willingness, enthusiasm, et cetera. But the rubric for reciprocity, it looks different. So to give an example, I don't have any kids. I'm child-free. That's my choice, I love it. But I have a lot of friends who have small kids at home, or who have multiple kids, or whose work looks very different than mine, which is, mine's very flexible, theirs might not be. And so, the concept of reciprocity, there's a different expectation. There's a different kind of way that we show up, and there's space, and forgiveness, and allowance, and flexibility that comes up when we take into consideration each other's context.

That said, we need to also talk about what we hope to get in a relationship. And if you don't ask for what you want, sometimes you're unlikely to get it. And so, there's nothing wrong with speaking up and telling, share, like, the wishlist of what friendship looks like for you, and ask your friend what the wishlist for friendship would look like for them. And often, you will hear things that you couldn't have guessed just like when you get someone's, like, real wishlist at gift time. And also, you get to share things that you would really love to experience in your friendship that they might never have guessed either.

Jessi Hempel:

Sure.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

Um, that makes a lot of sense and ... But as you're talking, I'm thinking about all the verbalization that goes into this approach to friendship.

Kat Vellos:

If you don't wanna verbalize it, you can also do it with action, and then ask them, how was that for you? Like, what did you think about that? Or invite them to do something that's different and, and gauge their response. Are they, like, "Uh, no," or are they, "Oh my God-

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Kat Vellos:

... yes." (laughs)

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs) Um, well, I think one thing that comes up for folks in adulthood, particularly if you've moved to a new place, or if because of the pandemic you live in New York, and everybody else you know moved away, it can be hard to figure out what the on ramp is to new friends. And I wonder if you might have some guidance on that.

Kat Vellos:

Yes, actually. My entire TEDx talk is about this, and it's about the power of a simple invitation. And I, I put simple, you know, we can think of it kind of in quotes. It's simple in that it can be short, it can be just two sentences, but it's not simple because it requires courage and risk-taking, and the willingness to put yourself out there and sometimes be disappointed. It doesn't always work. But when we craft a very inviting and warm invitation to connection, that is the thing that takes it from, oh, I like these people [inaudible 00:09:44] to, like, oh my God, now they're a part of my life, and we're integrated to each other's lives in a more meaningful way. And having the courage to craft an invitation and extend it, being willing to hear any answer whether it's yes, maybe, no, not right now, in two months, whatever, uh, that is the thing that takes you from feeling like, well, I can't get out of the box that I'm in right now, but I want this bigger experience and the only way to-to get it is to invite people to create it with me.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Kat Vellos:

And the other thing I'll tell you as someone who's organized hundreds of workshops, and gatherings, and events, and parties, and different things, sometimes it's also a numbers game. Like, when you have a meetup, and you invite people and 30 people RSVP, be prepared for 50% of them to show up on a good day because people change their mind. Their schedules change, life is unpredictable. Things will happen that prevent 100% yeses all the time, and you just need to be prepared for that. It's not about you.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. Well, you know, there's also a way that, um ... Like, the moment that we live in-

Kat Vellos:

Mm-hmm.

Jessi Hempel:

... uh, means that for many people particularly anybody my age and younger, um, we've kind of fossilized our friendships as we've moved through the world. Anybody we've ever picked up, uh, is added to our Facebook friends portfolio or-

Kat Vellos:

(laughs)

Jessi Hempel:

... LinkedIn connections, whatever it is, and continues.

Kat Vellos:

Yes.

Jessi Hempel:

And in my parents' day and age, they'd be friends with someone, and then we'd move away, and that person would fade away, and maybe 20 years later they'd run into each other, have a phone call, and it would be so nice to reconnect. I'm kinda overwhelmed by this model of fossilization, and I wonder if you might have any guidance for how we make sense of all those people that were friends, and so I guess they're not not friends.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah. I, I think of these friendships as kind of being in, like, the deep freeze. Like, you were friends maybe in college, and your friendship went into the deep freezer, and then they pop back up, and you can thaw it out in the microwave and then it's like, "Hey'

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Kat Vellos:

... soup." And so, it's not that you're not friends, but we also have to acknowledge our capacity and there's research that shows that the greater the number of relationships you're trying to maintain at one time, just due to the constraints of life, and time, and space, and physics, like, each person will get less of you. And so, it really isn't possible to stay super tight close friends with every single person you've ever met or felt close to. That's just a fact of life. Of course, with social media, there's this way that people don't really fade away, and so there's this question mark around, what are these relationships? And whether we call them friends. And the word friend is asked to do a lot of work in our society because we use it for everything from someone you knew in third grade to the person you'd give a kidney to.

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Kat Vellos:

And so, (laughs) it's tough. Let that go about, like, what is the label for this relationship? And then instead, say, what is your capacity for the number of friendships that you feel you can maintain in your life in your context, and then who are the people that you really wanna bring into that circle so that you can give them the best of your attention?

Jessi Hempel:

We're gonna take a quick break here. When we come back, we're gonna talk about social media. So stick around. And we're back. Before we get started, I wanted to tell you about Feedback Fridays over here in the studio. I've started talking to listeners every Friday. I wanna learn more about your careers and why you listen, what's important to you. If you're up for talking with me, email me at Hello Monday at LinkedIn.com. It'll help us make the show better. Now just before the break, Kat was pointing out that we can only have so many friends. Have you heard the term, Dunbar's number? Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist who found that we're capable of maintaining around 150 relationships period. Family, co-workers, neighbors, they all get a spot on that list. But as Kat tells us, people come and go, and that's okay.

Kat Vellos:

We lose on average, one to two friendships a year. Doesn't mean there was a big break up. Doesn't mean there was a blow out or anything like that. It simply happens through attrition. Maybe they moved to Australia. Maybe they had a newborn and, like, didn't have time to connect with you anymore. Whatever it is, people kind of fade in and out. And also, when people get into serious relationships, we typically have one or two close friends kind of migrate to the next ring of, like, casual friends.

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Kat Vellos:

(laughs) And then they're not so so close anymore 'cause you make all this time for the person you're in a relationship with. And so, knowing that there's this general number of, like, all the people that you know is around 150. Um, think about it not as, like, one big, giant circle where all 150 are equal in terms of their closeness. There's, like, five super close. There's, like, 15 casual. The- It, it, it really is rings that add up to about 150.

Jessi Hempel:

Dunbar's number makes sense if you consider that throughout most of history when we were hunter gatherer tribes of people wandering nomadically across the earth, we didn't really even ever see more than 150 people in an entire lifetime. In the early days of social media, I remember talking with founders of companies like Path and Facebook about whether we could somehow gain that number. It turns out we can't.

Kat Vellos:

We have every kind of social media. We have every kind of way of staying in touch with other people or connected to them, uh, even if it's extremely tenuous (laughs) and, like, all you are are nodding acquaintances after a while. When I first joined Facebook ages and ages ago, I tried to be, like, very particular with myself of, like, only having 100 friends. And if I added somebody, it meant that I needed (laughs) to remove somebody 'cause it's, like, I can only give attention to how, how many people, right?

And I would also do this thing where when I met somebody new, like, say at a potluck or a dinner party, and at the end it's like, "Oh my God, I love talking to you. Do you wanna be friends? We should keep in touch. Yeah." And they'd be like, "What's your Facebook?" And I would be, like, "No." I was like, "I really want to be friends with you, so I'm actually not gonna add you on social. I'm gonna give you my phone number. And if you wanna hang out, text me or call me." Because what would happens is as soon as I became friends on social media with somebody, we would default to interacting with each other's posts online instead of meeting up face to face.

Jessi Hempel:

OMG here, that is me. Like that awesome woman I met on vacation last year. Started following her on Instagram. A year later, I'm still liking photos of her toddler's birthday party, but I've never even called her or emailed.

Kat Vellos:

And what I wanted was to say, "If you wanna find me, it's gonna be in the real world. Let's make that happen, not just slide into this very passive way of, uh, having parasocial relationships with each other through the internet."

Jessi Hempel:

Okay, that sounds so wise and also, you put it in the past tense. So how did it work for you? What did you learn? Yeah.

Kat Vellos:

It worked great. I did it for a number of years, and eventually I reached a point ... I think after another move to another city, I was like, "Well, it's just gonna be more efficient (laughs) to be able to, like, be online with each other, or to be able to, like, invite people to an event," especially with my work now. I, I, I need to be able to broadcast stuff about my work, particularly around friendship and that's just gonna need to be to more than 100 people at a time (laughs). So yes, that's part of the reason why it's past tense.

Jessi Hempel:

So is that how social works for you, Kat?

Kat Vellos:

Mostly. Yeah, mostly. Yeah, particularly ... Like, my Instagram is about my work. Um, LinkedIn is about work, right? Twitter was kinda my water cooler for, like, not just work, but like, other random things. Like, does anybody have a cabbage recipe? It was the casual space and the kind of work talk too. I had a lot of awesome colleagues I loved connecting professionally with on Twitter. But it was also just, like, a, a playground to just, like, s-, share jokes and stuff. (laughs)

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Kat Vellos:

So, yeah. (laughs) I mostly go on social media, uh, personally for, like ... to laugh.

Jessi Hempel:

So to bring us back to sort of how, how the mechanics of friendship work, um, I've been thinking a lot about the role that my gender plays in the friendships that I have. I identify as female. I suspect but do not know that that plays a part in, um, how I show up in my friendships and sometimes when friendships feel uneven in whether-

Kat Vellos:

[inaudible 00:17:56]

Jessi Hempel:

... people want or feel they deserve more from me. And so, it just leads me to the-

Kat Vellos:

[inaudible 00:18:00]

Jessi Hempel:

... to ask the question, how do race, class and gender fit into our friendships with each other?

Kat Vellos:

[inaudible 00:18:07]

Jessi Hempel:

Can our friendships across divides in, in any of those categories ever be truly honest?

Kat Vellos:

Well, I think in order for them to be honest, we have to acknowledge the ways in which who we are and what we are affects our experience in life and can affect the power dynamics in a relationship too. You mentioned that you're female, and you were obviously socialized as a woman because of this, and so some of the ways that we are taught to, like, always be giving, put other people first, make everybody happy, be the nice girl ... Like, all of these things can play into the ways that we show up in friendships if we, uh, aren't aware of that training (laughs) and socialization. And so, when we have friendships then that are different ...

Like, one of my best friends is a, is a guy. I'm a Black woman, he is a white man. We happen to have become roommates (laughs) in our early 20s, and we've been friends for 18 years. And so, there have been many times where we've had many very honest, difficult conversations about the fact that there is a power dynamic difference in our relationship. There have been gaps sometimes in his understanding of what my life is like and me trying to, like, share what that (laughs) is like to, like, gain some, uh, sense of, like, empathy and understanding. But it's also a really safe place. Like, there's a ... There's a podcast out there called, like, No Stupid Questions and our friendship is a place for no stupid questions. Like, I've told him, "Like, you can literally ask me anything, and I will share with you." And I ask him things too.

And so, when you have deep, deep trust and real commitment, it's okay to screw up. It's okay to ask dumb questions. It's okay to acknowledge the things that are different about you with making it seem like any person is better than the other person. And so, I think if we just be honest about that, then we can have those conversations. And if somebody messes up, we can trust that it was really a mistake and not hurtful, and then forgive each other, and move on.

Jessi Hempel:

I love thinking about the idea of our closest friendships as no dumb question safe spaces.

Kat Vellos:

Mm-hmm.

Jessi Hempel:

Um, and, and particular against the backdrop of a world that, um, increasingly thinks that everyone's questions are always dumb, which causes us to be-

Kat Vellos:

Yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

... more and more scared in public places to have these conversations.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

How can we nurture these conversations and create safe spaces for these conversations-

Kat Vellos:

Mm-hmm.

Jessi Hempel:

... in our friendships? You mentioned time as one of the factors that really supported you guys.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

Um, it sounds like it wasn't a chosen context, uh, just like the original context of being roommates.

Kat Vellos:

Uh-huh.

Jessi Hempel:

I think it was chosen, I don't know.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah, so to answer the question in your question, uh, I had a mutual roommate, and we needed to fill a third room. And that other roommate was like, "I think you'd really like my co-worker 'cause he's looking for a place. Do you want to meet him and see if he should move in?" And so, it was funny. Like, we always joke that, like, he was so right. My friend moved in. That roommate moved out. Two months later, he's lost to the wind, but we ended up staying best friends for 20 years. So, um ... So there's that. There was an element of choice and also, trust. And then the element of time is huge. So in the book I include research from Dr. Jeffery Hall who has found that to go from a stranger to a, like, casual friend takes about 30 hours, 30-ish hours. But to become a best friend, takes 90 to 200 hours and it needs to happen within the first, like, eightish weeks of knowing each other. And most adults will be hard-pressed to find 200 hours (laughs) to spend with a friend in two months, um, unless you live together like we did, or you work together, and you are together side by side all day long every single day just like you were with your classmates in middle school, or high school, or college, or whatever.

And so, the impact of this frequency on our ability to form a close connection is massive. So if you really like somebody, and you have the option to spend (laughs) a boatload of time with them early on in your friendship, by all means, do it because it can give you the foundation for something that can last much longer even if your frequency drops after that point.

Jessi Hempel:

There's one relationship that I don't wanna overlook. That's the one that we cultivate with ourselves. That friendship strengthens all others.

Kat Vellos:

We are our first best friend, yes. Um, and as, as I mentioned earlier, uh, in the our world and data [inaudible 00:22:24] survey, one of the things that we see is that the time spent alone throughout life, it rises all the way up until the end of life. So with every passing year, we are likely to spend more and more time on our own and that's what it is, and you can work to change that if you actually wanna spend more time in relationship and in community. But if we know that that is a likely story, then think about, what do you want if you are your own best friend, or you can create your own ideal friendship with yourself? So one exercise that I think is really good for this if somebody wants to try it out is to get a sheet of paper and write down everything that you wish you got in an ideal friendship and then carve out time for yourself once or twice a month to experience that on your own.

So if one of the things in your ideal friendship would be going to the museum and seeing, like, a really mind-opening exhibit, you can still do that by yourself. If you love, like, fresh homemade Italian, like, pasta from scratch, then take yourself to a beautiful dinner and get that portobello tortellini, and have your glass of wine, and enjoy it at the nice restaurant by yourself. Or if you are needing more play in your life, and you didn't get to have the fancy Lego set when you were a kid, buy it for yourself and set aside a Saturday afternoon to build that Lego by yourself. Whatever it is, like, carve out time every single month for yourself to take yourself on a friend date for yourself, and also it's a good practice to do with a friend. But make sure you do that for yourself, so that you are building this relationship of trust and love with yourself, so that the more time you spend on your own, the more you enjoy it and feel at home in yourself.

Jessi Hempel:

That was Kat Vellos. Learn more about her work on friendships at weshouldgettogether.com. Do you have a work bestie, a work husband, a work wife? If this conversation resonates with you, make a point to send this episode to them, please, and tell them, "Hey, you're important to me." We're gonna talk about work friends at office hours this week. So here's my question for everyone. How are you being intentional about nurturing those relationships? We'll go live from the LinkedIn News page Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern. If you'd like a direct link, email us at Hello Monday at LinkedIn.com. We'll also pick up the conversation in our Hello Monday group on LinkedIn. You can find your invitation in the show notes. Join us there.

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn News. Sarah Storm produces our show. It's engineered by Assaf Gidron, Rafa Farihah, Wallace Truesdale, Kaniya Rogers, Michaela Greer and Victoria Taylor, our strong friend material. Joe DiGiorgi mixes our show. Courtney Coupe is head of original programming. Dave Pond is head of news production. Our theme music was composed just for us by the mysterious [inaudible 00:25:19] Master Cylinder. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn.

And this week we say a special good luck and sadly, goodbye to our good friend Victoria Taylor. Victoria, you have been with us for so many of these episodes. You are such a great friend of the show and to each of us. I have to say, I still remember that time in the midst of the pandemic when it was my birthday, and you sent me special treats straight to my door, delicious treats. I feel like I can still taste them. That's the kind of friend you are and the kind of friend you will always be. Hope you'll still be listening because we'll always be thinking of you. All right, I'm Jessi Hempel. We'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening. Hey, Jen?

Jen Reingold:

Yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

Um, so I just recorded a podcast, and we just made the episode. And it's running next week, and it is on work friendships. And I ended up opening the podcast by talking about how important it was to me to sit next to you while I was at Fortune.

Jen Reingold:

Oh.

Jessi Hempel:

So I just ... Actually, I don't even have a question for you. I just wanted to call you and tell you that 'cause it's been too long since we've talked, and um, I spent an entire half an hour telling everybody how important work friendships are, and how they're not work friendships. They're friendship friendships, and then I thought, I haven't talked to you for a bit, and you're important to me. So that's it.

Jen Reingold:

Oh, you are so important to me. And you completely made my day just now. I just ... I have been actually doing a lot of work thinking about people that matter to me in my life, and I feel exactly the same way about you. And you and I spent some really, really critical moments together, both professionally and personally that I will never forget. So I'm kinda flattered and embarrassed that you said that on a podcast, but I-

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Jen Reingold:

I really [inaudible 00:27:20].

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Jen Reingold:

And I, I ... You really made me happy, so.

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs) Awesome.