I get the sense that some people are tired of the hard work and self-awareness required to actually build positive relationships with their teammates.  I say let’s pack in the Kumbaya crap and get on with it. Here’s why you don’t need to bother liking one another.

  • If you don’t like your teammates, you won’t want to spend time together. That means fewer, shorter meetings and we all know that meetings are the bane of modern existence. If you don’t like each other, you’ll actually have time to do work.
  • If you don’t like each other, you’ll give frank and honest feedback to one another instead of sugar coating and pussyfooting. Criticism is the basis of personal growth and development so you’re doing your teammates a favor by disliking them enough to tell them the unvarnished truth.
  • If you don’t like your teammates, you don’t have to get all whipped into a froth when things are going south for them.  Giving a damn can tempt you to take your eye off of your own priorities and we all know that relentless focus is the secret of success.
  • If you don’t like them, you don’t need to share the credit for successes.  No more worries about missing someone from your Company Values Award acceptance speech.
  • If you don’t like your teammates, you can stick with email and not waste precious time and energy with laborious phone calls, or worse…face-to-face conversations where people might take advantage and try to drone on about their own projects. Big relief.
  • When you like your teammates, the day goes WAY too quickly. And we all know that we don’t have enough hours in the day, so goodness knows we don’t want them to go any faster.
  • And the best thing about not liking your teammates…you save a fortune on shower gifts and birthday cakes.

Ok, so I’m being sarcastic. At some level it’s true.  For your team to have a hope of getting things done in the high pressure, rapidly changing world today, you need to communicate well, to have confidence in one another, to disagree productively…but you don’t need to like each other. But it’s a heck of a lot better when you do. In my next post, how to learn to like someone you don’t.

Further Reading

Fresh start every morning

The Secret of Effective Teamwork

Help! I Don’t Like my Teammate