Hate your coworker or employee? Congratulations! You have completed the first step in making things work. Acknowledging you have a problem, after all, is the first step.
Ironically, teams where everyone likes each other are typically weak teams. People (that includes you) have a tendency to like people who are like them. We revel in similarities. Yet a team of copycats will have tunnel vision and won’t have complementary skills. Great teams don’t like each other nearly as much as they respect each other. There is greatness in differences.
Abraham Lincoln was famous for building a political cabinet of personal enemies. In a country that was polarized by a horrific civil war, Lincoln’s genius was to assemble a cabinet of people who were his sworn enemies. Members of his cabinet may not have liked him (or vice versa), but it served what the country (client) needed.
Your company has a mix of clients with different needs and demands of their own. Your company has a mix of things to do, which requires special talents. Your company needs diversity, but along with that may come personal conflict (just ask Abe). Here is how you manage the people you hate:
1. Stop Trying To Like Them – A big fallacy of managers is to believe they need to like the person they are managing. That is not the case at all. The manager just needs to respect what the employee does. And when I say “respect,” I mean to see genuine value in a talent or ability of that employee. Stop trying to find things to like about the employee you hate – find something to respect.
2. Find The Bigger Enemy – My consulting group was engaged to help grow a business run by two sisters. The problem was finger-pointing. Each sister blamed her struggles on the other, and they hated each other. That was until they found out their father was diagnosed with cancer. Immediately they had an enemy (the cancer) much greater than their hatred for each other. Instantly they started to work together amazingly well. Seek to find a common enemy (perhaps a competitor) that you and the employee you hate can target together. A common enemy makes the best of friends.
3. Distance Makes The Heart Grow Fonder – Short, temporary bursts of disgust trump a continual stream. If you just can’t get over the fact that you can’t stand the employee you manage, put distance between you and the employee. Put them in a different part of the office, or in a different office altogether. Of course, you can fire them too…but we are working under the understanding that you have an employee who is great at their work – you just can’t stand them.
If Abraham Lincoln was able to manage a cabinet full of enemies and put a struggling country back onto the track to greatness, I think you just might be able to manage those employees you don’t like (but respect) and put your company back onto the path to success.
MIKE MICHALOWICZ (pronounced mi-KAL-o-wits) started his first business at the age of 24, moving his young family to the only safe place he could afford—a retirement building. With no experience, no contacts and no savings, he systematically bootstrapped a multimillion-dollar business. Then he did it again. And again. Now he is doing it for other
entrepreneurs. Mike is the CEO of Provendus Group, a consulting firm that ignites explosive growth in companies that have plateaued; a former small-business columnist for The Wall Street Journal; MSNBC’s business makeover expert; a keynote speaker on entrepreneurship; and the author of the cult classic book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. His newest book, The Pumpkin Plan, has already been called “the next E-Myth!” For more information, visit www.mikemichalowicz.com/.