Before I say anything else: I know that mapping family relationships onto a workplace is not everyone’s thing.
How you think about siblings depends entirely on what siblings have meant in your actual life, and some people have very good reasons to keep those two worlds firmly separate. Or maybe they haven’t had an experience of siblings (direct, chosen, or otherwise) and that’s absolutely valid.
Everything I’m about to say is filtered through my own experience and my own comfort with this particular lens.
If it doesn’t land for you, that’s OK. Keep what’s useful and leave the rest.
For me, though, the concept of a work sibling has been one of the most clarifying frameworks I’ve stumbled onto for understanding a specific kind of colleague relationship: one that I think many people have had and haven’t quite found the right word for.
Work Sibling vs. Work Friend
A work friendship is a relationship built on affinity. You like each other. You enjoy each other’s company. You’re probably cheering for each other. There’s real warmth there, and it’s genuinely valuable. But the relationship doesn’t have a lot of natural conflict built into it mostly because you don’t have to be in the kind of close proximity as someone you’re working toward the same goal with, under the same structure, in the same trenches.
A work sibling is different. You still like each other, but you’re also both accountable for the same thing, at least at some level. You have the same “one-up” leader, or you’re working on the same hard project, or you’re both trying to get the same initiative across the finish line.
Those shared stakes create something that friendships don’t always have: genuine friction. The kind where someone asks a question in a meeting that lands a little too sharply and you feel your jaw tighten. The kind where you’re running on pre-caffeine energy and someone says something redundant for what feels like the tenth time and you have to work to keep your face neutral.
The conflict is a natural part of this type of relationship. It doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means you’re close enough and invested enough that it actually matters when you chafe.
I had a group of peer managers I’d describe as work siblings without hesitation. We worked on genuinely hard things together, reported up through the same leader, and met in the same conference calls at the worst possible hours of the day (pre-caffeine in the morning, or post-“gestures broadly at the world” by late afternoon). We’re close enough to finish each other’s sentences. We’re also close enough to have had some memorable moments of sharpness with each other: the fast, pointed kind that flares and then drops almost as quickly as it started.
The pattern was predictable once I started seeing it.
Morning stand-up or end-of-day check-in, most of us present, reporting progress to a shared leader. Someone asks a question that pokes at someone else’s work in a way that reads as a risk flag in front of the boss. Or it’s just a question that’s been asked before, and everyone is tired, and nobody has the bandwidth to be gracious about it. The emotional resilience in the room is at its lowest. The friction spikes.
My rule, which I’ve held to regardless of who started it: I reach out first.
Not immediately. Sometimes you need an hour for the temperature to come down, but I always go back to the relationship.
I name that I value what we have.
I say we’re on the same side.
I say I want to clear the air.
And if we happened to be in the same building that day, I didn’t even need to say all of that. A message that said “want to get coffee?” was enough. A “come to breakfast with me?” before the next morning’s meeting. Just reinstating the ritual. Just letting the other person know our rhythms were still in place, that nothing had broken beyond repair.
Most of the time, that’s all it took. The relationship stayed intact because someone was willing to go first.
(It might as well be you.)
If you have a work sibling, you probably already know who they are. They’re the person you’ve disagreed with in a meeting and texted afterward. The person whose judgment you might question sometimes but whose presence you’d genuinely miss. The person you’ve chosen to keep being in it with, even when it’s been gnarly.
The thing about work siblings that makes them different from a lot of other work relationships is that the relationship itself is the long game. You’re not just cooperating on this project or this year, you’re building something that might outlast the specific job, the specific leader, the specific org chart you’re both currently living inside. That’s worth tending to.
A few things that have helped me tend to it:
Name the relationship explicitly, out loud, at least once. Not in a dramatic way. Just enough to say: I see this as something I want to take care of. That names it as a relationship worth investing in, and in my experience, most people feel that and appreciate it even if they don’t say so.
Go first on the repair. Every time, regardless of who started it. Not because you’re responsible for managing everyone’s feelings but because you’re the one who cares about the relationship enough to be reading a newsletter about it, which tells you something about who’s going to go first if you don’t.
Reinstate the ritual after the friction. Coffee, a quick message, an inside joke, whatever your version of “we’re still us” looks like. You don’t have to talk through every conflict to resolve it. Sometimes you just need to show each other that the rituals are still intact.
Work siblings are rare. I’ve been lucky to have a few. If you have one, take care of them.
I’d love to hear about your work sibling(s) as it helps us better understand each other as leaders and people! Thank you for being a reader and part of this community. You mean a lot to me. <3
See you next Tuesday,