Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without
By Tom Rath, Gallup Press, 240 pages, $22.95 hardcover.
Gallup Research has been studying friendship and workplace productivity for some time. In this book, Tom Rath presents their full-length findings for the first time.
What does friendship have to do with work? A lot. Rath believes companies are too focused on development at the individual and organizational level. They’re missing a focus on one-to-one interactions.
The benefits of these interactions and resulting friendships are endless. Duke University Medical Center found patients with less than four friends to be twice as likely to die from heart disease. Gallup research discovered that when your best friend has a healthy diet, you are five times more likely to have a healthy diet. In the workplace, employees with “vital friends” are happier, more engaged, safer, have higher customer loyalty ratings, and work in teams that are more profitable. How’s that for impact?
Each of your friends plays one of eight vital roles (builder, champion, collaborator, companion, connector, energizer, mind opener, and navigator). Evaluate your friends and their roles with the integrated online assessment tool. You can even share the results. The more friends you evaluate, the more you will understand what roles are being filled by your current friends and where you need additional support.
Overall it’s a great package. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain by checking it out. Take their advice: help yourself and your business by building stronger friendships
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