How to Treat Your Friends

Editor's note: Welcome to our weekly column on business etiquette. If you have a pressing question for Miss Conduct, please send her an email.

Ancient Roman advice dictates, "Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy." In terms of etiquette (if not affection), Publilius Syrus might have been on to something when he wrote this in his Maxims way back in 42 B.C.

Some might read Publilius as a suggestion to play your cards close to the vest, but Miss Conduct also reads it from the perspective of not giving friends reason for grievance in the first place.

After all, friends keep us afloat in not only our social lives, but also in the business world. They are also a prime source of references, leads, resources and solutions -- so just on the bottom line they deserve highest priority. Not to mention they lift our spirits, bet us a Starbucks we can't make it to that ghastly Monday meeting on time and help us bear up under the leadership of our utterly perfect bosses.

Unfortunately, our interrupt-priority existence often means we remember to celebrate our prospective clients' anniversaries, but forget our best friends' birthdays.

So in the spirit of friendship, Miss Conduct offers the following amicable reminders to keep your work mates from becoming checkmates.

• Return their contact. Phone calls, emails, instant messages, waves, smiles and even microscopically raised eyebrows across a tense conference room can signal solidarity. Ignore communication at your peril. If, as marriage expert and couples therapist John Gottman of the University of Washington tells us, healthy relationships maintain a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative encounters even when discussing an area of disagreement, we all need to take every opportunity to stuff our social ballot boxes with happy tickets.

  The trouble is, clients pay us and therefore go first on the call sheets, whereas we have only bits of time during the workday to keep up with all the old and new pals we accumulate. It's not easy. In order to maintain contact even during a crunch, Miss Conduct sets up codes with her best pals so that she can get back to them later without ruffling anyone's feathers. Sometimes these codes are cryptic, signaling to the bosom companion that our Worst Nightmare is standing in front of us so we cannot speak; sometimes they're obvious, such as replying to a long email message with "Will write as soon as I have time to be funnier."