Customer Reviews

Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without

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Tom Rath stepped up to the plate for his sophomore effort at a book, and delivered a good book. Vital Friends asks you to evaluate who you have in your life that is a friend, and what kind of friend they are.

This book continues on in Gallup's use of theory that asks us all to not expect people to be what they are not, and tries to help people be who they were created to be.
If your friend is an encourager, let them encourage, but they might not be the strongest mentor that you will have in your life. Do not put your friends into roles they are not capable of fulfilling - have lots of friends - Rath makes all these good points and more in his book, "Vital Friends."

An easy read, Vital Friends explores why relationships are important to success in life, career, family and more. This book is worth reading - another good effort from the folks at Gallup, and Tom Rath.

Vital Friends outlines the necessity and importance of friends in your personal and professional life. Tom Rath clearly illustrates the "Eight Vital Roles" that friends play in your life: Builder, Champion, Collaborator, Companion, Connector, Energizer, Mind Opener and Navigator. He includes steps on how to strengthen and/or create these friendships. After reading Vital Friends (short read-2 ½ hours) I have a new filter that I will use to view my friendships through and will definitely spend more energy building and strengthening these relationships. The book also includes an online diagnostic that allows you to analyze specific friends and build a website around these friendships provided you have the access code included in the book.

Imagine reading this as a book group selection -- read it with friends! Just think of the intriguing possibilities. What kind of friends do you have in the group? This will spark such discussion. How many frineds should be in the group? The more the merrier? Each friend added adds more depth even to the friendships we already have with others since each new friend brings out more in our friends than we would have found out without them. Book groups should pick this one even if they do not think of their memebers as friends.

In Vital Friends, Tom Rath makes two main points.

* One is that having friends at work is very beneficial to the employer. With a best friend at work, you are much more likely to be productive. Without a best friend at work, there's only a 1 in 12 chance you'll feel engaged! With three good friends at work you are 96% more likely to be extremely satisfied with your life. (All the numbers are from a Gallup poll.)

* The second point he makes is that you can't expect all your friends to be all things to you. He says different friends fullfill different needs and describes the different types of friends:

o Builders
+ Motivators and coaches
+ They push you
+ They know our strengths
+ They provide moral support
o Champions
+ Stand up for you
+ Sing your praises
+ "Thrive on your accomplishments and happiness"
o Collaborators
+ Share similar interests, ambitions and passions
+ Do a lot with you
o Companions
+ Always there for you
+ Make sacrifices for you
+ First person you call
o Connectors
+ Always introduce you to others
+ They seem to "know everybody"
o Energizers
+ Your "fun friends"
+ Make good days, great
+ People you call to have a good time or to relax with
o Mind Openers
+ Ask good questions
+ People you share ideas and express yourself outloud with
o Navigators
+ Give advise
+ Steer you
+ Share dreams and goals

Interestingly, he says that in friendships we don't play the same role to each other. So you might be a mind opener to your friend and your friend might be a champion for you.

This book was an easy and interesting read. You can easily read it in a day. (I read it on a two hour plane ride.) However, I would have liked a lot more detail and depth.

I've heard of good friends, close friends, old friends, casual friends, best friends, even "just" friends, but I had never heard the word "vital" to describe friends until this book. And that is exactly what Tom Rath proceeds to explain, that having friends, real, meaningful engaged relationships, is absolutely vital to our health, our well-being, and our personal and professional success. Not "a good idea" or "important" but actually "vital"- absolutely necessary.

He starts the book by stating that so much of the focus on personal and professional success is on self-improvement. But is that really the key? His answer is, "The energy between two people is what creates great marriages, families, teams, and organizations." In fact, his first chapter is entitled, "Who Expects You to be Somebody?" where he wisely observes that it is almost always the influence of meaningful people in our lives that drives us to achievement.

The second chapter, "The Energy Between," discusses how, "Focusing on the individual is too narrow -- and focusing on the entire group is too broad. The real energy occurs in each connection between two people, which can bring about exponential returns." His next chapter, "Better than Prozac?" cites some interesting research, including a Duke University study showing people with less than four close friends had more than double the risk of heart disease.

The most helpful concept he develops in the book is that of "the rounding error" in chapter 5. It is easy, he says, to expect a friend to be "well rounded"-- in other words, to be good at everything: inspiring us, being a companion to us, giving us an energy boost, expanding our horizions, and a dozen other different things. This often subconscious expectation is both unrealistic (no one person can meet all our relationship needs) and a potential relationship killer, both in friendships and in romance and marriage.

In a similar vein, he warns us of expecting friendships to be "reciprocal." In other words, I may be an energizer to my friend, but he may be a mind opener for me. Expecting to receive the same of what I give to a friend again is both unrealistic and a potential relationship killer. I surmise that is why the Duke health research found that it takes at least four close friends-- because different people will speak different things into your life, and you need different kinds of friends to have well-balanced friend "nutrition" for your soul, just as you need different foods from different groups to give your body what it needs.

The second part of the book goes into more detail about the vital importance of friends at work, citing both anecdotes and research. The final part of the book more fully develops his system of eight vital friendship roles:

Builder
Champion
Collaborator
Companion
Connector
Energizer
Mind Opener
Navigator

He discusses how these roles differ and how to develop these roles both in your life and in the lives of your friends. The book also gives you an access code to a website where you can take a survey to help classify your own friends as to the roles they play in your life.

I realized the importance of my friends before I picked up this book. But after reading Vital Friends, I had more appreciation of my friends, new insights into the nature of our friendships, and greater skills & determination to develop our friendships further.

This book raises some great points that really make one think, both about friendships in general, and also their place in the workplace. One must be careful though as the author appears to confuse correlation with causation in several places. Fortunately, these points are irrelevant to the focus of the book.

In terms of friendships at work, the author shows this to be a win-win situation for employees and employers, improving both happiness and productivity. A case is made, therefore, that employers should take action to encourage this. Unfortunately, the author completely avoids the downside to this - namely its putting all the eggs in one basket - if one leaves or loses one's job, one loses, or it least becomes more distant from, one's friends. This can also make it more difficult to leave companies that head in a bad direction, inhibiting them from "getting while the getting is good." I'm not saying that having friends at work is bad, just that the negative consequences should be acknowledged.

Finally the book talks about eight distinct roles of friendship, and how expecting one friend to cover all roles is not only unrealistic, but damaging to the friendship as well. By thinking of your friends in the role(s) they fulfill for you, and you for them, it helps one decide whom to see for what purpose. This is original and very useful information.

Mankind is a social animal. This book looks at the social aspects of going to work, with particular reference to developing friends whith whom you can talk, socialize, bounce ideas from, and so on. It offers insight I haven't seen before in terms of selecting a small handfull of people to call friends. These, I visualize as the people you might stay in contact with should one of you leave the company.

The concept of a small workgroup has long been recognized as being important. Most sports teams, for instance have somewhere between five and eleven players who work together. This book takes that further into finding friends that bring a particular way of helping each other. He does this by defining eight different kinds of relationships you might expect out of a friend.

This book provides for some interesting concepts on how a business might be set up to operate more effectively. It is recommended to anyone starting a company or to HR people in larger companies.

I finished reading "Vital Friends." This is a great book and very easy to read. It is only 152 pages if you exclude the appendices. So, it can be finished in a few sittings.

Here are some of the books findings:

*People who have friend(s) at work are significantly less likely to quit.
*They are also happier
*Have less health problems

The book recommends that companies enourage on the job friendships and not to totally seperate one's social life from ones work life.

The Book then talks about the different types of friends and the different roles they play in helping ones well being and career at work.

Finally, the book talks about how to grow these friendships and making them
stronger.

I have the hard cover edition, which I got as a gift from my cousin. If you are not happy with work, one of the reasons could be the fact you have no best friends at work. If this is the case, go ahead and buy the hard cover edition. Otherwise, you can wait until the soft cover or paper back version is out. Eben for those of us who are happy with their work and friendships this book offers some good information and would help you better understand your friendships.

My book club read Vital Friends last week. The men responded well to it; the women seemed lukewarm. All of us liked the book's values.

Rath's survey study reveals surprising connections between productivity and policies promoting friendship at work. Rath also developed a structure for analyzing dynamic components common among friends, a structure available on-line.

Our book club men found the analysis especially revealing when applied to their personal lives. Our women were less inspired, perhaps because thinking about friendship was not such uncharted territory.

I liked Vital Friends much better after talking about the issues it raises. The bottom line: thinking aloud about friendship is important to both private and public well-being.

While most of us appreciate the importance of a good friend at work, for some reason it does not seem to be a priority for leaders who suggest employees, "Leave your personal issues at home" or "this is work, not a social gathering." Rath does a wonderful job of tying vital friendships to productivity through a review of his and other people's research. One of Rath's insights is that we tend to compartmentalize friends relying on certain ones for support, others for socializing, and a different set of friends for professional/intellectual stimulation. The book comes with a survey to rate your different friends and evaluate their strengths. He then offers strategies to maximize your friendships or to find new friends with the qualities you need to balance out your life. This is a great companion book to other books by the Gallup Corporation including Now Discover Your Strengths; First Break All the Rules; and Follow This Path. Again, while this intuitively makes sense, it's not common practice for leaders to build on the friendships of co-workers. My hunch is a lot of that is due to the paranoia of leaders who fear that friends will band together and question the leaders behaviors.
Michael B. Grossman MSN, RN
Doctoral Student in Management of Organizational Leadership