On Working With Your Partner, Children and Friends. Part 1.
Proceed with caution. Be very careful about starting to work with your children/partner/friend. There is a great deal at stake. Just because you make a good team in one way doesn’t mean you’ll make a good team in other ways. And never forget that family and friends are more important than work. Work, especially work that makes your heart sing, is amazing; but screw up your personal relationships and everything else falls apart.
Don’t get caught up in the romance of it. Just because you love/like someone doesn’t mean you will be able to work well with them. It absolutely can work, magically so, but it can also be a disaster.
Success in your work relationship is based on respect. Show this person the same respect at work that you do at home. Never, ever, be a grumpy sod with them at work, even if you can get away with that outside work.
Allow your partner/friend to keep your ideas in check. And don’t be defensive. Caroline is good at this. I have an ability (some parts good, some parts bad) to fizz with ideas all of the time, and Caroline knows how to help me to control them. Recently I told her about an idea for a new book and she reminded me that I have plenty to be getting on with. She was right.
Set boundaries for when you do and don’t talk about work. Or try to. This is often hard to formalize, and Caroline and I haven’t ever really been able to do so, because one weekend one of us might feel like talking work when the other doesn’t, or whatever. So, I suppose it isn’t about saying ‘we never talk about work after 8pm or at the weekend’, but more about learning to quickly recognize when it’s the case that someone doesn’t want to talk, and shut the conversation down straight away, rather than imposing it on your partner/friend. If you do impose it, you will not only irritate your partner/friend but have an unproductive conversation. Lose/lose.
All (or nearly all) of the rules that apply to efficient working relationships also apply to working with this person. So, just because you are working with your wife/friend/boyfriend don’t forego proper meetings, written communication, shared diaries. Be efficient, communicate robustly, treat work as work. Of course, you can be relaxed and have fun and muck around; you should always be able to do this at work anyway. But you need to keep records, take minutes, that sort of thing.
