Professional relationships are fast being catapulted into personal ones. Reasons are not difficult to find. The colleagues are the ones with whom people spend a substantial amount of time in the workplace and they comprises of those with whom a person shares those intimate moments even if that means sharing a personal opinion on an issue which otherwise is the exclusive domain of his near and dear ones.Colleagues are the ones to whom people have started to confide a whole range of issues, notwithstanding the competitive pressure and professional under-currents, perennially present in the working environment. Workplace related romance are seen in full bloom these days.People often tend to forget that a colleague with whom they have to share a relationship and stop somewhere so as to avoid crossing that line separating personal and professional attachment, goes much beyond that, culminating in a colleague taking center stage in their life.They enjoy festivities, special days like birthdays or any other day for commemoration together in their lives.Even after one partner departs from the organization where the relationship blossomed, they are in touch, through email, telephone or even occasional personal meetings, sharing their professional and personal issues with ease, unless they decide to convert that into a full fledged personal relationship and bonding .At times they tend to open up more in such relationships, rather than the one which is either blood related or with a close acquaintance.The flip side of such relationships can be disastrous as well.If one is unable to draw a line separating a professional relationship from a personal one, especially when the trusted partner is not worth to be included in the personal network, there can be instances when the so called friend can take undue advantage of the same while encountering professional challenges and hardships. In a dog eat dog environment, where survival of the fittest holds the key in a competitive workplace, quite often such relationships takes ugly turn, spelling disaster not only for the person involved, but also by vitiating the working environment.To add to all these, personal relationships at the workplace may create in personal bonhomie and lead to some sort of illicit rapport between the two, drawing unnecessary attention from onlookers.Seniors, peers or even junior colleagues may at times use such relationships to their own advantage, embarrassing the people engaged in the relationships, by leveraging professional milieu out of it.The bottom line is to understand the pros and cons of such relationships before taking the plunge by metamorphosing a professional contact into a personal one.
