Why liking people matters at work
Here's how to enjoy coworkers to cultivate organizational reliability
I knew a manager once who’d say, “Look, we’re coworkers; we don’t have to be friends.” My research interviews have turned up similar phrases over the years: “I keep my friends outside of work.”
The wisdom in those statements is that they put work in its place. Your job’s not your life. Your work’s not your identity. But does that mean that affection among your coworkers doesn’t matter?
Say you manage a team of half a dozen remote employees. They do their work—okay. But because they’re always a little behind, you worry that, one of these days, a regulator’s going to slap you with a fine for operational mistakes. Your team seems oblivious. Some actually complain that you push them too hard. During one-on-ones with you, they keep their distance.
Maybe you see no connection between reliability and liking in an organization.
Would you give me seven minutes to convince you otherwise?
Welcome to the Mode/Switch! This is a work-culture newsletter that helps you seek wellbeing in working community. I’m an organizational researcher at Calvin University, and my goal is to connect seemingly small issues with larger questions that invite practical communicative solutions. Glad you’ve stopped by!
What Liking Doesn’t Mean
If you’re feeling a gut-level dislike for my argument this week, perhaps you and I are defining liking in different ways. Let me tell you a story about what liking’s not.
During the unhappiest season of my professional life, I had a manager whose expectations I couldn’t meet. My usual approach in working relationships is to be an empathizer and, on my worst days, a pleaser. But this manager rejected all my overtures. I suspect I came off as incompetent: Craig’s being nice to compensate for his inadequacy. Eventually, I went from being overtly nice to being silently desperate. I stretched myself to the limit to meet expectations. The effort wasn’t all in vain: those expectations pushed me to excel in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise. But I couldn’t escape the notion that the harder I worked, the more the manager doubted me.
I learned something else from that experience: liking doesn’t mean sameness and it doesn’t mean pleasing.
So, now that we’ve dismissed what liking your coworkers doesn’t mean, let’s talk about what another kind relational warmth might do for organizational performance.
What Liking Might Mean
Last week, I was at Lipscomb University in Nashville for an inter-religious workshop with fifteen people I’d never met before. Our first evening together was a little awkward. But a day later, we’d found our footing in the work together. The facilitator put three sacred texts in front of us: Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim. And then we (from our various religious standpoints) read them aloud together and tried to notice things we’d never noticed before. The work required us to listen closely to the texts by listening to people around us.
At one point in the dialogue, a woman named Melissa looked up from across the table and said to me, “I like the questions you’re asking.” It was a noisy gathering with lots going on, but even now, days later, it’s those words that I remember vividly.
This story sounds self-congratulatory. I thought about writing that story in the third person to brush out any appearance of narcissism. But Melissa’s statement was, for me, an irreducibly first-person experience. What mattered wasn’t so much the content of the conversation (I doubt my questions were profound) but seeing and being seen. And when she said gave me the gift of regard, I felt strengthened in the work.
And that’s what I think it means to like someone else at work. It’s a kind of regard. You appreciate their person. You might even say you enjoy their way of being a soul.
That experience suggests this insight. High-functioning organizations benefit when workers like each other, because their liking diversifies attention for their work. Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliff write in Managing the Unexpected that high performance in constantly changeful circumstances requires collective sensemaking. It’s like we’re all working on a 3,000-piece puzzle. Nothing empowers people for that shared focus than feeling appreciated for their quirky willingness to see things and try things. Enjoying each other, regarding each other, liking each other liberates people’s looking.
How to Reset Liking at Work
But do you really have a choice about whether you like your coworkers or not? Isn’t liking just an instinctive reaction—something like preferring salty things over sweet? Maybe. Especially on first encounters. But communication practice can open up possibilities for longer-term liking at work.
In Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet plays a world-weary Mare Sheehan, a detective who’s angered and bewildered by a crime committed in the community she loves. She’s burning out. Seeing her exhaustion, her police chief partners her, against her will, with a county investigator named Zabel. She mostly avoids him at first. But in the show’s second episode, he brings her coffee and says, “Mare, can we, uh, hit the reset button here?” She dismisses him: “I don’t even know what that means.” But he doesn’t give up: he tells her that he doesn’t want to take over the investigation; he’s there to assist her. He makes a joke by adding, “You’re the chef. I’m the sous-chef. What are we cooking?” The silliness works. When he holds out his hand and re-introduces himself, she smiles in spite of herself.
I have to admit that Zabel and Mare’s relationship becomes romantically complicated—a cautionary note about the risks that open when coworkers like each other. But I admire Mare of Easttown for depicting mutual affection as more than interpersonal. The investigators admire and enjoy each other in a way that helps solve the case.
Let’s go back to the hypothetical manager I described above. There may be a member or two on the team that persistently resists any bid for liking. But don’t reduce working community to a one-on-one. Keep trying to hit the collective reset. Keep making the small moves that scale liking into effective working community.
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If you’re looking for other ways to cultivate good working relationships, I’d love for you to check out my new book Digital Overwhelm. The book shows you how to practice communicational flexibility in spaces where our tools too often corner us.
