When a relationship outgrows where it started

Elicia Verderber and I first met in Pittsburgh when I was running eflatbed.com. She stood out immediately. She was sharp, curious, a strong writer with a gift for positioning ideas clearly, and the kind of person others naturally gravitate toward.

We worked closely for about a year before our paths diverged. I left Pittsburgh. She went on to Deloitte. We stayed in touch, initially through a mentor-mentee relationship that made sense given our respective stages of life and career.

What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was where that relationship was headed.

Recently, we walked 4.5 miles across theMSA Safety campus together. Somewhere along the way, Elicia said something that stuck with me: what began as a workplace-based/employee relationship had become a lifelong friendship.

That felt exactly right.

Most professional relationships start inside a specific context: a title, a reporting line, a project team, an org chart. Those structures help define the relationship at the beginning. But the best relationships eventually outgrow them.

Our conversation moved quickly past catching up. We talked about work, life, parenting, decisions, transitions, and the kind of questions you only bring to people whose judgment you trust. We laughed a lot – especially as we reflected on how work has evolved from the dot.com era to the AI era we are in today. We were still using fax machines in the late 1990s when we worked together.  Elicia chuckled as she remembered standing at a fax machine to send communications.  Now AI has redefined work, automating many manual tasks and augmenting what people can do.

That is what stood out most to me.

Over time, role and title matter less. What remains is whether you still value how someone thinks. Whether you learn from being in conversation with them. Whether trust and respect have continued to run both ways.

Most professional relationships stay professional. The ones that become friendships are built on something more durable than the circumstance that created them.

This walk reminded me why I value these conversations so much. Dialogue Miles™ is not really about the distance covered.

It is about the depth of conversation that distance makes possible.