How to Get on With Your Colleagues

A guide to better collaboration

Alain de Botton, Alain Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912891429
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

An essential guide to navigating the complexities of professional relationships.

Often, the most difficult aspect of work has nothing to do with deadlines, promotions, or competition. It has to do with the immense and beautiful challenges of dealing, on a daily basis, with our colleagues.

The people we work with can encourage, support, and energize us, However, working successfully around others, whether virtually or in person, is neither intuitive nor simple. It requires us to communicate effectively, to understand our own blind spots and biases, and to empathize with another person's perspective.

The School of Life has been working with organizations since its foundation, equipping employees with the emotional intelligence required to succeed. This book collects their learning into a series of lessons on workplace psychology. The result is an essential guide to harmonious, happier, and more profitable organizations.

• A PRACTICAL GUIDE: to working successfully with our colleagues.
• FULL OF THOUGHTFUL EXERCISES AND ADVICE: for working collaboratively.
• EXPLORES CHALLENGING WORKPLACE BEHAVIOR: such as defensiveness, over-optimism, and immaturity.
• THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED AND CLIENT-DRIVEN: informed by practical experience and research from The School of Life for Business who deliver in-house training for clients including: Facebook, The Financial Times, Google, Havas Media, Nike, and Sony Music.
• AN INFORMATIVE GUIDE: for individuals and businesses alike.

1. Our Unhappy Past

For millennia, the idea of needing to get along with, let alone like, the people one worked alongside would have sounded absurd. Work was not an arena for friendship, self-development, meaning or pleasure. It was a curse, a biblical punishment and a necessary evil best endured with stoicism and resignation.

Workplaces were strictly hierarchical, with each person ordering about the person below them with little regard for their feelings and with a certainty that subordinates would never answer back, let alone endanger the business. The primary tool of management was the whip.

There was little choice about what job one might do. One often inherited roles; the child of a textile weaver would also become a textile weaver; the son of a lawyer would take their place in the family firm. Those in charge never asked themselves whether their workers were having an interesting time. The success of an enterprise in no way depended on whether employees found their work satisfying or to their taste.

Shouting was the best way to get anyone to do anything; it was the ideal and preferred method when trying to get labourers to dig harder, miners to push coal trolleys faster, or steelworkers to increase their rate of production at the blast furnace. A worker could feel underappreciated and bullied and nevertheless be able to perform their required tasks to perfection. Emotional distress didn’t hold things up. One could operate the cotton mill at maximum speed even if one hated the manager or clean out the stables thoroughly even if one felt the foreman hadn’t enquired deeply enough into the nature of one’s weekend.

2. The New Cost of Unhappiness

Gradually, the world of work underwent an enormous change. It went from being primarily physical in nature to being overwhelmingly mental, dependent on our intellectual and psychological capacities as opposed to our sinews and our sweat. With this evolution came a new and, for managers, disturbing realisation: people’s ability to perform their functions would now depend to a significant degree on their levels of contentment and fulfilment. How well a company might function, and therefore how profitable it could be for its investors, would critically depend on whether the junior employees felt adequately heard, a manager had a proper sense of purpose and the members of the accounts department were having a sufficiently interesting time. To their consternation, the stewards of business came to realise that they would need to start taking an interest in the mental wellbeing of those they employed.

Nowadays, without ample respect and encouragement, without a feeling of camaraderie and support, huge sums of money will be wasted on workforces and their resentment, sobbing or latent fury. Major costs, and important lost opportunities, will be entailed if a crucial member of a team can’t take criticism, is sluggishly demotivated or if key figures can’t manage the emotional rivalry between them. The profitability and future development of an enterprise can hang on what’s happening in the head of someone sulking in the corner during a meeting or on the capacity of someone in a senior position to listen imaginatively to the mumbled concerns of a shy junior.

In the pre-psychological age, the success of enterprises depended on material factors: on access to resources, capital and technical expertise. But now, if we wanted to assess how a business might be doing in two years’ time, a telling indicator might be what happened after an intern was found weeping in the bathroom or a member of the marketing team fell into a mood with their boss. If one has any concern whatsoever for the bottom line, there is no alternative but to be concerned with the psychology of the workforce.

______ There are many options when our computers break down; few when those we work with destroy our peace of mind.

3. Gossip

That said, if there is one generalisation we can hazard about humans in the workplace, it is that they are tricky: they make too much of a fuss or not enough of one; they fail to listen or speak incessantly; they procrastinate or rush everything unduly; they grow unfeasibly furious or lack self-confidence; they backstab or dither, panic or daydream (to start the list).

We are often alone with the problems that this produces. There are many options when our computers break down; few when those we work with destroy our peace of mind. In desperation, we have one chief source of solace: we gossip. We find an ally somewhere in the team with whom to privately discharge our accumulated sorrow at the behaviour of our colleagues.

Exercise

Write down the names of three challenging people you are working (or have worked) with.

Three challenging co-workers

The problem with gossip in offices isn’t that it happens, but that it isn’t taken seriously enough. We gossip from pain and impotence; from frustration at how difficult our colleagues are combined with despair at being unable to do anything to alter dynamics other than point to the problem ironically and sigh darkly over a drink in a café around the corner from the office. Gossip is palliative; it doesn’t hold out any hope for a more mature solution to our distress or a proper improvement in our workplace relationships.

But gossip is much more interesting and important than is generally understood. It reveals significant information about what is wrong inside a company and what could, with a few interventions, be put right. In its vague and elusive way, gossip circles essential topics. What we gossip about are the central themes of office psychology: we indirectly talk about communication, trust, self-worth, empathy, self-knowledge, respect, creativity and eloquence. We may not use these terms exactly; in our stories we may stick to specific people and devastating and witty takedowns of their foibles, but at heart we point to multiple failures in the arena of emotional development. It is not hard, once one starts, to perceive the psychological issues pulsing within the objects of our gossip, to identify beneath our wounded criticisms of a few maddening people a range of essential (and more universal) themes of emotional existence.

Exercise

Moving from gossip to psychological investigation.

Three challenging co-workers	What they’ve done	Psychological trait
1. Aditya	Tell marketing one thing, accounts another	People pleasing
2. Mary-Jane	Furious with Dave’s report on the meeting they organised	Defensiveness
3. Pablo	Furious response to being left off an all-staff email by error	Paranoia

Part of what may dissuade us from delving deeper into the psychology of our colleagues is the widespread belief that offices are and should be ‘professional’ places. By this we mean places where people are expected to leave their personal and emotional issues behind in order to focus in on fulfilling tasks with quasi-mechanical efficiency. Although it is now thought unacceptable to try to skirt psychological issues within romantic relationships, it is still broadly expected that work should be a simpler arena where most of the complexities and sorrows of being human do not rear their heads. Once we are at our desks, we should no longer cry or panic, view our colleagues with fear or envy, focus on the person not the job, or disturb the flow of business with our accumulated oddities and compulsions.

However, we never quite manage to be self-contained and sober. Crises, passions, neuroses, jealousies, breakdowns and sulks accompany us at the office. We cannot invariably be the professionals we aspire to be; we can’t neatly divide ourselves between the infinitely demanding and convoluted beings we are in our emotional lives and the ideally regulated automatons we are expected to be at work.

4. Psychotherapy at the Office

To help us cope with the complexities of the office, we have on hand a discipline not often associated with the workplace and typically relegated to private life: psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy remains one of the most valuable inventions of the last hundred years, with an exceptional power to raise our levels of emotional well-being, improve our relationships, redeem the atm...