So much precious time and resources are wasted on separating your work relationships from your personal relationships. I mean, it is always a good idea to separate your work life and obligations from your personal ones, but there is this ongoing narrative that your team at work has to be different from your team at home.
A few people, mostly entrepreneurs, manage to work together as a team in the office and at home, but it is rare. If you’re starting a business, investors would advise against it; if you’re looking for a job, you’re supposed to not work together.
Imagine if we became good at compartmentalizing our work obligations from our professional ones. We would be able to solve so many problems easily, faster, and probably more efficiently as we wouldn’t have to spend time on making new teams and relationships for every project.
In fact, if you look at some of the top success stories, they were a result of professional/personal collaboration. Successful people have this innate capability to separate concerns, much like we aim for in our software code.
Companies need to investigate coaching employees on this instead of spending resources on creating rulebooks and curbing our natural human tendency to leverage effective teamwork for bigger and better goals. Given the opportunity, this would lead to better execution and possibly even more innovation.
Sure, there are challenges; some people are not good at teamwork, and if they bring their personal challenges into their workplace, it might be a recipe for disaster, which is what led to rulebooks around teamwork. The answer, in my opinion, though is to focus on coaching. Instead of shuffling the human problem here, the goal should be to tackle it head-on, and look at the bigger picture.
