For decades, executives have repeated the truism “It’s not personal, it’s business,” implying that emotional distance is a hallmark of professionalism. But that logic is badly outdated, especially now that employees are spending more of their waking lives at work than with family or non-work friends, and the post-pandemic world has left many professionals more isolated than ever. The former U.S. Surgeon General has warned of an “epidemic of loneliness,” with profound consequences for workplace productivity, engagement, and retention, to say nothing of almost one million premature deaths worldwide each year.
In knowledge-based organizations—now among the most dynamic and fastest-growing sectors of the economy—trust, psychological safety, and rapid learning are the currency of achievement, and these conditions flourish when people build genuine friendships. Today’s realities make it clear: Forming friendships through work is not only human; it’s a business and wellbeing imperative.
I’ve spent decades studying what I call business friendships, and I can attest that these relationships produce personal and professional benefits, which include trust, emotional support, knowledge sharing, innovation, career advancement, and job performance. But many people face a barrier to obtaining those benefits. I call that barrier separate-worlds thinking, which is the idea that any interpersonal exchange involving money will ultimately be commodified and stripped of emotional value.
I encourage leaders instead to adopt integrated-worlds thinking, which accepts and even celebrates relationships in which the personal and the professional overlap. In this article, I’ll offer a set of concrete actions for cultivating an integrated-worlds perspective. But first it’s important to look more closely at separate-worlds thinking, to better understand its allure and learn how to overcome it.
The Allure of Separate Worlds
This logic of separate-worlds thinking is both cultural and cognitive. Culturally, people learn that introducing money into personal exchanges contaminates their emotional meaning. Hence the persistent aversion in Western cultures to giving money—or even practical items—as gifts, because they fail “as an expression of real friendship.” Cognitively, psychologists point to “taboo tradeoffs”: When people are asked to weigh affection or loyalty against money, they experience moral confusion or outrage, which helps explain why putting a price on a child or human organ feels unthinkable.
Separate-worlds thinking surfaces in business models. Airbnb began with a model in which hosts welcomed guests into their homes and collected payment only at the end of the visit, much like traditional guest houses. The company’s founders realized their model had to change after they stayed as Airbnb guests themselves, befriended their hosts, and then experienced the awkwardness of engaging in a financial transaction with their new friends. Today, all Airbnb payments are handled in advance at arms’ length, to keep the worlds separate.
Together, these norms and mental reflexes explain why many leaders feel a quiet unease about mixing the personal and professional. Recognizing their hold on us is the first step toward integrated-worlds thinking.
The Power of Integrated Worlds
Before I describe the advantages of integrated-worlds thinking, try this: On a blank piece of paper, draw a circle and label it “friends.” This represents the set of people to whom you would apply that label. Next, draw a second circle labeled “professional network.” This represents the people relevant to your professional success. Now comes the key decision: To what extent do those circles overlap? Make this decision honestly based on how you conceive of the two categories.
When I’ve asked executives to do this, roughly 10% have drawn circles that barely touched, another 10% have drawn circles that overlapped by 50% or more—and the rest have fallen somewhere in between. I’ve run analyses on 1,500 executives and found that those with more overlap tend to have bigger professional networks, higher career satisfaction, and higher incomes. Why? Because friendship is the domain of social exchange, which is effective for the exchange of information.
Consider Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa, who became friends as MBA students and founded Warby Parker, the disruptive direct-to-consumer eyewear company. Their initial informal partnership—reached over beers in a Philadelphia bar—was based on two commitments: Work hard on the company and remain friends.
Blumenthal and Giloa have collaborated successfully since 2010 as co-CEOs, a challenging and fragile relationship, and they attribute this to the open communication that their friendship makes possible. In addition to growing Warby Parker into a national brand, they’ve also co-created an early-stage venture capital firm called—appropriately—Good Friends. Their friendship exemplifies how personal bonds can sustain collaboration where contracts or incentives would fail.
Some readers might wonder about the price of such overlap. They might expect the integrated-worlds devotees to have “tainted” relationships, and to pay psychic costs from juxtaposing the personal and professional domains.
In fact, my analysis shows the opposite: Integrated-worlds thinkers fare better socially and personally. Because they can savor the emotional content of their business friendships without guilt, they report more trust and closeness in those relationships, and on average they’re happier than those who maintain separate worlds.
How to Integrate Your Worlds
To cultivate an integrated-worlds outlook and the business friendships that come with it, I recommend taking the following four steps.
Put personal before professional.
My research has shown that despite what you might think, new business friendships are formed on purely personal bases—in particular, on shared values and personal identities. Instrumental interests don’t enter at all into the process. So, to make more business friendships you need to focus on what’s personal: Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially bonded over their shared identity as hackers, whereas the decades-long friendship of Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger was founded on shared values of integrity and long-term thinking.
Although new business friendships tend to form on personal foundations, they endure because they provide professional benefits. It’s not that people consciously calculate the utility of a friendship; rather, when a relationship is no longer helpful in their work, it quietly fades. This pattern—forming relationships around personal identity and values but sustaining them through professional contribution—allows people to feel their friendships are authentic even as they benefit from them at work.
The relationship between Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who founded Airbnb, illustrates this dynamic. The two are friends who share the key values of creativity and community, and a defining identity as design thinkers. On the job, their skills are symbiotic such that together they can achieve things neither could alone, with Chesky as the visionary, and Gebbia as the hands-on innovator.
Their professional relationship has evolved since 2022, when Gebbia stepped away from operational responsibilities to pursue philanthropic projects, but their personal relationship remains as warm as ever, with Chesky describing Gebbia as “family.” Their story illustrates a vital truth: Putting the personal connection first doesn’t just make collaboration possible. It makes it enduring.
Expand your concept of friendship.
People can typically maintain about 150 meaningful social relationships, spanning categories from intimates to good friends to casual friends. How you define “friend” determines how often you feel you can bridge the personal and professional.
When I ask executives “What does friend mean to you?,” separate-worlds thinkers tend to give narrow definitions such as “someone you could ask for any favor” or “someone you could share any secret with.” These correspond to only the closest friendship categories and are too limited to allow the full benefits of integrating friendship with work. Integrated-worlds thinkers define a friend more expansively, often as “someone you like and would voluntarily spend time with,” which opens more of their relationships to overlap with their professional lives.
This recognition of gradations is also useful for managing relationships. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, for example, distinguishes between “allies,” who warrant frequent contact, high trust, and significant favors, and more casual “friendlies,” positive ties with whom can be maintained with less contact and smaller exchanges. Friendships of all kinds require time and effort, and matching those inputs to the closeness of the relationship helps ensure they remain both authentic and sustainable.
Expand your concept of professional relevance.
Just as expanding your definition of friendship widens your social circle, expanding your definition of professional relevance widens your professional circle. If you expand both circles, you’ll make it more likely that they’ll overlap.
With that in mind, look for professional potential in every personal relationship—and don’t feel bad about doing so. Casual friends in other organizations and industries might help you see opportunities to apply artificial intelligence for employee recruiting. Your neighbor might put you in touch with a potential investor or board member. Your college roommate, who works in a different industry, might offer you new perspective on a strategic decision. Your mother might support you during a stressful new product launch. When you can think in those terms, you’re practicing integrated-worlds thinking.
I once did a study of creativity among early abstract artists and found that artists who formed more cross-disciplinary friendships (say, a poet befriending a sculptor) also tended to be more creative and become more famous. Separate-worlds thinkers tend to see friendships with people outside their day-to-day work as professionally irrelevant. In contrast, integrated-worlds thinkers are more open to professional benefits coming from any source, and therefore more likely to find those benefits.
Offer—or ask for—the first favor.
A global consumer-products company once asked me to study its star research scientist. What distinguished him, I found, was his ability to build friendly relationships inside and outside the company. He built these relationships by offering his expertise to other scientists, who gratefully accepted it and reciprocated by giving him access to information and ideas that fueled his productivity. His success points to a key practice for building business friendships: Start by giving.
Friendships are the domain of social exchange; they involve the give and take of favors. Offering a favor is therefore an effective way to begin or deepen a friendship, because it signals generosity. Taking the initiative also gives you control: You can come up with a favor that will help the other person but be easy to provide.
Asking for favors builds connections too. Benjamin Franklin observed that the best way to make a friend is to borrow a book. When someone grants a favor, he believed, their liking for the recipient increases, a pattern that modern experiments have confirmed. You can take advantage of this by asking someone for advice—about your leadership, your organization, or anything you want to improve. If genuinely motivated, asking for guidance acknowledges the other person’s knowledge and creates an authentic human connection.
Friendships thrive on reciprocity but when you think about trading favors, it’s important to be fuzzy rather than precise in your accounting. The more precise you get, the more likely you are to start thinking of imbalances in what you owe and are owed—and the harder it becomes, because of the taboo tradeoff, to invite the exchange of relational resources such as loyalty and affection that cannot be easily quantified.
Consider Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who keeps a handwritten list with two columns, one of people he owes favors and the other those who owe him. This practice acknowledges the importance of social exchange but isn’t ideal. The problem is that the givers and receivers of favors value them differently, so social exchange does not lend itself to double-entry bookkeeping. A better approach would be to combine Dimon’s columns into a single list of friends with whom one exchanges favors, but to ignore the balance of favors unless it seems seriously off. That’s what I mean by fuzzy accounting.
Start by giving. Don’t be afraid to ask. Keep the accounting fuzzy. These small acts can transform acquaintances into lasting friends and allies.
The evidence from executives, entrepreneurs, and my own research is clear: When we allow friendship and work to coexist, our performance and our happiness both rise.
By emphasizing values and identities when choosing friends, by broadening who counts as a friend or is professionally relevant, and by initiating the exchange of favors, you can integrate your worlds and create relationships that are as personally rewarding as they are professionally productive. In the end, the healthiest organizations and the most fulfilled leaders are those that treat friendship not as a distraction from business but as a powerful antidote to the isolation that undermines performance and well-being.